Every December, after months of travel and conversations in newsrooms around the world, I pause to look for the throughline — the change that matters most. For 2026, that insight came while finishing my latest book, Consulting with Heart.

The more I reflected on what great consultants actually do — interpret dreams, distill ideas, nurture the “biography of an idea” — the more I realized something: The future of journalism belongs to newsrooms that embrace a consultant’s mindset.

As AI takes over routine tasks, journalists will shift from producing stories to diagnosing what communities actually need. The core value of the newsroom becomes interpretation, clarity, and emotional intelligence — not volume. In an AI world, the differentiator is journalists who realize that the scent of the human is already one of the most precious gifts they can offer their readers. In successful 2026 newsrooms, journalists will reinforce AI as a supportive collaborator rather than a replacement with the “scent of the human” — that irreplaceable essence of emotional depth, personal intentionality, and curiosity, which the data-rich bots can’t replicate.

Editors, designers, and product thinkers will operate like consulting teams: listening deeply, defining the audience’s problem, and co-creating the best format for solving it — whether that’s a vertical explainer, a 60-second clarity video, a WhatsApp Q&A, a TikTok clip, or a longform narrative.

This evolution brings back the spirit of WED (writing-editing-design), but with a new layer: WED+C — writing, editing, design, and consulting.

The prediction is simple: Newsrooms that adopt a consultant’s mindset — empathetic, diagnostic, co-creative — will build deeper trust and produce the “from one person to another” style of journalism that truly helps people navigate their lives.