This week’s media briefing looks at how publishers are reorganizing their sales teams. A growing number are bringing client success, client services, and account strategy roles deeper into the sales process to handle more complex direct deals and campaign execution.
- How sales teams are shifting to support
- IAC rebrands to People Inc., CNN is beating subscriber targets, and more
How sales teams are shifting to support
Publishers have been moving away from the old ad sales model and toward setups built around outcomes, performance, and custom partnerships.
That shift is also changing the structure of sales teams. In many cases, client success and client services employees are now more involved before and after the sale, especially when deals require more hands-on support.
At USA Today Co., about one-third of the sales team are active sellers, while the other two-thirds are focused on sales enablement and customer success, according to Jason Taylor, the company’s CRO. He said the company still has dedicated programmatic sellers, but many team members can also sell direct-sold programmatic inventory at a premium rate.
Taylor said the sales organization has been realigned to support outcomes and performance as much as selling itself.
This mirrors a broader shift across the ad industry. Some agency holding companies are also reworking compensation models so that pay is tied to business outcomes, such as sales and brand performance, instead of billable hours.
At USA Today Co., having dedicated sellers and client success teams on larger accounts has improved campaign performance. Taylor said more advertisers now rely on publishers for full-funnel delivery, and that makes real-time performance updates and campaign optimization necessary.
The same kind of change has happened at The Wall Street Journal over the past few years. According to CRO Josh Stinchcomb, sellers now make up only a quarter of the sales team.
The remaining team is split between client success, custom studio, and product marketing and strategy. The client success group handles post-sale work, including project management, campaign management, and account management, with a strong client-facing focus. Stinchcomb said the Journal’s ad business is almost entirely direct.
Hearst has a similar structure. About a quarter of its sales team are sellers, while the rest work in client services, marketing, account strategy, creative studio, and roles tied to social, agencies, and programmatic.
Over the past year, Hearst has merged pre-sale and post-sale work into a single account manager role, according to CRO Lisa Ryan Howard.
Hearst is also hiring seven more people for client services because its advertising business and video output continue to grow. Howard said the company now has a much larger direct sales team than programmatic team, though she did not share exact numbers.
The Wall Street Journal has also reorganized its sales team around industries or sectors, such as financial services and luxury, from the sales process through ad operations. Stinchcomb said these pods help build deeper expertise around each vertical.
A major reason for these changes is the move away from impression-based and display advertising toward more custom content. Events, in particular, have become a bigger part of publisher businesses. Recent research found that events revenue has overtaken subscriptions as a top revenue source this year.
The Journal now has a group of event moderators inside the sales team, something that did not exist a few years ago. Stinchcomb said the rise in custom content and event activations has increased campaign complexity and made client-facing support more important.
Without that support, sellers would spend too much time coordinating with client event, content, and communications teams instead of focusing on new business.
Howard said Hearst needs larger and more structured sales teams because its ad business now spans multiple platforms, including Apple News and YouTube. Advertisers also expect large publishers to report performance in real time, both on and off platform, which adds pressure on client services teams.
Since the team restructure, Hearst has seen consistent improvements in win rates and renewal rates, Howard said.
One publishing executive described the change bluntly during a recent closed-door town hall session: the old model, where sales teams were mostly sellers and support was a small share of the organization, has flipped. Now, marketers and support staff often play a bigger role in selling, and the post-sale process matters much more.
That executive said publisher sales teams are increasingly acting like an extended marketing agency for brands, which means more people are needed on the client support side.
AI accelerating this evolution
This shift is picking up speed as AI becomes more embedded in publisher workflows. AI tools help teams respond faster to clients, improve campaign performance, and reduce the amount of manual work required, which frees more people to focus on client services.
The Wall Street Journal is testing AI tools for plan creation in beta, with broader testing expected to begin in the second half of this year, according to Stinchcomb. The sales team is already using AI for meeting prep, including background research.
Stinchcomb said AI is changing the skills he looks for in salespeople. He now wants people who act more like investigative sellers – people who can gather information before others and get ahead of RFPs. He is placing more value on deep relationships and strong presentation skills.
He said AI is making it clearer which tasks humans should own. As a result, organizations need people who are especially strong at relationship-building and presenting, while research and organization matter less than before.
USA Today Co. is also using AI to take a campaign that worked well in one market and apply it to others across the U.S. For example, a cosmetic dentist campaign in Florida could inform a similar campaign in Nashville. USA Today Co. operates in more than 200 U.S. markets.
Taylor said the company is using AI across the full advertiser journey, from lead generation to cash collection, with agents deployed at multiple points in that process.
He said the combination of more client success talent and AI tools has improved client retention every quarter for the past few years. The goal is to study campaign data in real time, communicate insights back to clients, and recommend changes that can improve results.
What we’ve heard
“It’s the ability to deliver a digestible story in [a few] minutes, which does not always come naturally to all reporters… Who can do that in real time? We think about this from our social video perspective. Sometimes too, it’s how would you describe this story to a friend over coffee?… Getting a peek into the reporter’s notebook and an understanding of the process, is one I think that lends well to this creator format.”
Adam Banicki, GM of video at Fortune Media, on what his team looks for when scouting the newsroom for journalists to put in front of the camera.
Numbers to know
$400 million-$500 million: The amount of revenue Vox Media generates.
50%: The drop in readership for Vox Media’s lifestyle brands.
$10 million: The amount Robert Allbritton, co-founder of Politico, plans to invest in the Washington, D.C.-focused publication the Star, with a goal of reaching break-even by 2029.
⅓: The share of websites created since 2022 that are AI generated, according to a recent research report.
What we’ve covered
The rise of deepfakes is creating a new trust problem for publishers
- As AI deepfakes spread faster and become harder to detect, publishers are under pressure to verify what is real and protect audience trust in a flood of synthetic content.
- A recent report found 3,165 deepfake incidents in March 2026, up from just four in January 2020, showing how quickly synthetic media has escalated.
News UK is turning The Times’ first-party data into synthetic audiences for advertisers
- News UK is using The Times’ first-party data to build a synthetic audience-planning tool for advertisers.
- The system combines multiple data sets and uses a synthetic-audience platform to model key audience segments, supporting subscription strategy, content decisions, and product development. The Times now has 659,000 digital subscribers, up 7% over the past year.
Beehiiv keeps adding features to compete more aggressively for creators
- Beehiiv has expanded its toolset with webinars, AI analytics for podcasts, and metered paywalls as it pushes to become a more complete creator platform.
- The company has also added a podcast product and has reached out to podcasters elsewhere, including on competing newsletter platforms, about migrating.
What we’re reading
IAC rebrands to People Inc.
IAC is changing its name to People Inc. to emphasize its publishing business. The company is also cutting staff to save about $40 million. Neil Vogel and Tim Quinn are expected to keep their current roles at the parent company, while Christopher Halpin is stepping down from his role as chief operating and financial officer.
The Washington Post is trying to bring back some laid-off staffers
After announcing major layoffs in February, The Washington Post later asked some employees to return under a delayed layoff plan. That move was partly driven by the number of people who left voluntarily after the cuts.
CNN is exceeding its subscriber goals
About a year and a half after launching its dynamic paywall, CNN says it is outperforming the subscriber targets it set.
Journalists reacted quickly during the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner shooting
During last week’s shooting outside the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, politicians and journalists hid under tables, filed stories, livestreamed from their phones, and were escorted out by security.
iHeartMedia may be headed for a sale to Sirius XM
iHeartMedia is exploring a possible sale to Sirius XM. A deal would combine the largest radio station owner in the U.S. with the largest satellite radio service, creating a company with more than $12 billion in sales.
