The Daily Beast’s Keith Bonnici, Anne Marie O’Keefe of Mansueto Ventures, Steve Russolillo of Business Insider, and Omar Hamdi of Pathos Communications at Press Gazette’s Media Strategy Network USA event on 12 March 2026. Picture: Nick Starichenko/Press Gazette
AI has become a “direct contributor” to the profitability of The Daily Beast, according to president and chief operating officer Keith Bonnici.
The title moved into profit for the first time in its 17-year history last year after new leadership team Joanna Coles and Ben Sherwood took over.
Bonnici was speaking on a panel about AI at Press Gazette’s Media Strategy Network USA event held at Stagwell’s One World Trade Center office in New York on Thursday 12 March.
Speaking alongside Bonnici were Anne Marie O’Keefe (chief operating officer of Mansueto Ventures which publishes business newsbrands Fast Company and Inc), Steve Russolillo (chief news editor of Business Insider) and Omar Hamdi (chief executive of Pathos Communications).
[Read more insights aimed at US-based readers of Press Gazette via our weekly Future of Media US newsletter ]
Bonnici said he had hoped AI would be a “quick accelerant” to the business by using it “heavily” in the newsroom.
But he said he listened to The Daily Beast’s journalists who “educated me on how that’s just the absolute wrong way to go for a business that’s built and rooted in journalism.
“The thing that became pretty obvious pretty quickly is that the main reason why consumers continue to come back to The Daily Beast, and why it has such a large audience, is because they developed a relationship with the brand, and mainly a relationship with the journalists we have, and it’s difficult to build a relationship with AI.”
Bonnici added that he has a background in lifestyle media (for example as an executive at Evolve Media) and that news journalism has proved “very different”.
“The practice of journalism is something that I’ve grown to really admire and respect,” he said. “And so how we use AI today is very different than what I expected it to be when I got there. But we are using it and so there is a happy medium that we’ve learned, and it’s mostly being used in terms of processing production, and less so in terms of the actual core function of journalism.”
These include tools to help with uploading content and images into the CMS as well as research and fact-checking.
Daily Beast president Keith Bonnici speaking on a panel at Press Gazette’s Media Strategy Network USA event in New York on 12 March 2026. Picture: Nick Starichenko/Press Gazette
In addition The Daily Beast has “significantly increased” its video and podcast production with just a “handful of people” thanks to the addition of AI to cut video and expedite editing.
Citing other ways AI has indirectly impacted revenue, Bonnici said: “Our programmatic business has grown dramatically. That wouldn’t be possible if our ad stack wasn’t influenced and helped and aided in decisioning by tools that we use.
“Our subscription business has become a real focus for us, and the ability to identify creative trends, pricing trends in the market to learn what stories are driving subscriptions – those are things that used to take massive teams of analysts and data reviewers to figure out…”
AI is also driving direct revenue through a licensing agreement with “one of the big players”, Bonnici said.
“We were profitable and healthy last year. So the business is really exploding, and that’s driven, I think, by a lot of things, but AI is a direct contributor to that.”
[Read more: Daily Beast gains on Reddit and Facebook as Google traffic falls ]
Fast Company publisher: ‘We know our value, and we’re going to make sure that we get it’
Mansueto Ventures has not yet signed any AI licensing deals but has taken part in talks.
O’Keefe explained: “Our publishing output is significantly less than a New York Times or a Wall Street Journal, and so a lot of times our licensing talks degrade into ‘well, we’ll give you tooling,’ and we have to say no thanks…
“We are always open and want to engage in the talks, but we know our value, and we’re going to make sure that we get it.”
Inc produces the Inc 5000, an annual list of the fastest-growing private companies in the US which has been running for more than 40 years (as the Inc 500 until 2007).
O’Keefe said the Inc 5000 comprises “an unbelievably rich first-party data set, so we’ve been really protective and careful with that”.
She added that “we’ve been very careful in terms of evaluation and protecting our existing profitable lines, and we really put the guardrail piece first”.
O’Keefe said: “Where we see our most success is in the connection we have with the companies we recognise, and with the people who are paying us to be members of our executive communities. And so that really was our focus. We’ve led with: anything we do with AI has to serve and protect those two businesses first, and then where can we scale and where can we grow, sort of separately from that.
“I think having amazing colleagues in the industry who’ve gotten out there first is enormously helpful to those of us that decided to take the more cautious approach.”
Mansueto Ventures COO Anne Marie O’Keefe speaking on a panel at Press Gazette’s Media Strategy Network USA event in New York on 12 March 2026. Picture: Nick Starichenko/Press Gazette
In terms of how AI is used internally, O’Keefe said tech journalists for Fast Company and Inc have embraced experimenting with the tools.
She said they ask: “How are small businesses using AI? What tools are they using? What access do our journalists need to those tools so they can cover it for the reader and give them something that’s real value? The average small business owner can’t experiment with ten different AI tools. But I’ve got a journalist who’s willing to do that for you.”
O’Keefe also said that “one thing we will never use AI for is to write something humorous, because AI has no sense of humour, and you certainly can’t rely on it for context. But there are still a lot of operational pieces you can automate or pick up.
“We have a really ambitious group of people. I have more ideas than I have people. Can AI help us achieve making some of those ideas to daylight? That would be unbelievable.”
Business Insider moves towards nurturing direct relationship with audience
The event heard that 80% of stories published by Business Insider are now classed as exclusives, scoops, and original reporting.
Chief news editor Russolillo told the event: “There’s been this renewed focus now on really making sure that the stories that we are producing and publishing are stories either that one, you can’t get anywhere else, or two, they’re framed in a way that is different and unique and distinct, just to BI. And so this has been a huge shift.
“There have been many iterations of Business Insider over the years, but one of them was a very aggregation heavy model. And so we moved way away from that with the idea that in this new era where we want to have more of a direct relationship with our readers, a direct relationship with our audience, the best way to do that is to earn trust.
“And the way to do that is to be producing stuff that nobody else has.”
Business Insider chief news editor Steve Russolillo speaking on a panel at Press Gazette’s Media Strategy Network USA event in New York on 12 March 2026. Picture: Nick Starichenko/Press Gazette
PRs ‘need to talk a lot more responsibility’
Hamdi of (event sponsor) Pathos Communications spoke about how “PR firms need to take a lot more responsibility” following Press Gazette’s reporting of fake experts , often pushed out by PR agencies, getting published in major newsbrands.
“I think if I was a publisher, I wouldn’t feel great about PR as an industry overall,” he said. “I think there’s something fundamentally unfair about PR firms generally not taking a huge amount of responsibility for what they produce and charging $25,000 a month retainers and expecting publishers to support their businesses where the publisher might be on their second round of layoffs.”
Hamdi said Pathos has internal journalists that, through the use of AI, are “a lot more efficient than they were two years ago, but there absolutely need to be limitations, and we don’t allow our writers to just use AI to write for the obvious reasons.
“It reminds me of one of our writers who broke the rules and decided to use AI to write, and then we caught him and told him to stop, and he’d forgotten how to write. So it’s important that we don’t lose that skill.
“But I think, generally, we all need to focus on the superpower that we have, which is telling truth from falsehood. And absolutely, I think the PR industry needs to take more responsibility, not only for what it’s putting out, but also if it’s sharing the wealth with the publishers who ultimately pay for their shiny offices.”
Pathos Communications founder and CEO Omar Hamdi speaking on a panel at Press Gazette’s Media Strategy Network USA event in New York on 12 March 2026. Picture: Nick Starichenko/Press Gazette
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