Exclusive Interview with Stig Ørskov

Two years ago, Stig Ørskov spoke at the Digital Growth Summit as the CEO of JP/Politikens Hus, a leading Danish media corporation. Now the CEO of WAN-IFRA, a role he stepped into after previously serving as its vice president, he’ll be joining us again on stage for the 9th edition of the Summit.  

Before joining us in Leuven on October 15, 2026, Stig and I sat down for a conversation to talk about the Nordic subscription playbook he helped build at JP/Politikens Hus and the impact of AI on journalism.

The media industry has already lived through a few digital transformations, from the internet to the smartphone and later social media. As the past CEO of JP/Politikens Hus, Stig believes he embraced the digital opportunities of each one.

"When you see things growing, ‘over-invest’ in those growth areas rather than underinvest in them."

- Stig Ørskov, President, WAN-IFRA

That said, recalls certain hard-learnt lessons from his time there: “I always ended up thinking in hindsight that I underinvested in growth and kept investing too much in existing activities.”

The reflex of those in charge, he explains, is to protect the area that is struggling, print for example, and to look for ways to fix it. Today he advises the opposite: “When you see things growing, ‘over-invest’ in those growth areas rather than underinvest in them.” 

AI tools have been helping publishers to optimize the way journalism is produced — from transcripts to investigative journalism — yet, for Stig, the real opportunity comes from understanding audiences’ behavior patterns. For instance, people are using chatbots more often to search for information, which forces publishers to look at how these platforms can be integrated into their businesses. “The chatbot is to a large degree replacing the browser,” he says. “And that will be a fundamental change.” 

For Ørskov, that integration question leads somewhere uncomfortable. He expects the basic unit of publishing to come apart. “What we have considered to be the primary unit of publishing, articles, TV shows, that will change,” he says, describing a dismantling of content into “units that are machine readable.” Which raises the problem he returns to: “When you have a part of your content represented in an answer on a chatbot, how do you ensure that that part of the answer is felt like your DNA as a news brand?” 

Asked whether some publishers might be overestimating what AI will do to them, Stig’s concern runs the other way. “My fear is that as an industry we have had a tendency to underestimate the need for change, especially organizational change,” he says, and this is the message he now brings to WAN-IFRA’s members. 

The difficulty, as he sees it, is that publishers built their organizations for something else entirely. “One of the questions we haven’t really solved as publishers is: how do we organize for constant change? The way we organize is for a much more stable way of producing things.” That stability was long a strength — newsrooms are very good at producing a large volume of content reliably — but it is not, he argues, the same thing as creating value. 

"My fear is that as an industry we have had a tendency to underestimate the need for change, especially organizational change."

- Stig Ørskov, President, WAN-IFRA

How do you know your audience is willing to pay? For Stig it comes down to two things held together: trust, and a product people actually want. He was part of popularizing the Nordic subscription model, built on a simple idea: people will pay for high-quality, trustworthy journalism. Publishers, he argues, cannot simply expect people to pay for content when information is available almost everywhere.

Trust is the backbone: “If people don’t trust you, forget about it.” It comes from strong ethics behind the way you produce journalism, and from being able to communicate that to your audience. But he warns against treating trust as a possession rather than a practice. “Trust is something you can’t take for granted. You need to constantly ask yourself: how do I ensure that the audience actually believes what I choose to put in front of them?”

Trust alone does not close the sale. “You will never be successful unless you are able to build products that are attractive as well.” His example is Zetland in Denmark, which took audio seriously early while much of what he calls legacy media stuck to text.

He has no doubt subscriptions will keep growing, pointing to newer arrivals such as Goalhanger and The Athletic. “I think we have just seen the first phase of that.”

After a long career as the CEO of JP/Politikens Hus, Stig embraced a new role at WAN-IFRA, that he is proud to represent. It is a large project with the goal of bringing different experiences together: “What we try to do is to inspire the industry and to find the best examples of how to handle the transformations that we are in the middle of.”

When he was a CEO himself, he says, it was the place he looked to for inspiration and, just as usefully, for other people’s failures and mistakes. “We build knowledge, we share our knowledge, and we connect people. And magic happens when you connect people and add a level of knowledge to that.”

That is more or less the premise of the Digital Growth Summit too. Stig Ørskov opens the 9th Digital Growth Summit on the CEO panel, alongside Gert Ysebaert, CEO of Mediahuis Group and former President of INMA.

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