USA Today Co. is rebuilding its audience operation as falling search referrals force publishers to rethink how they reach readers, Digiday reports.
Monica Richardson, senior vice president at USA Today, told staff last week that the company is creating a new audience and digital production team. The reorganization will also result in some layoffs.
“Growing audience by producing more content isn’t as effective as it once was,” Richardson wrote in an internal memo obtained by New York Times reporter Ben Mullin. “Search traffic is under pressure, and platforms are increasingly keeping user experiences to themselves instead of sending them back to us.”
The changes are part of a broader shift described in previous Media Copilot stories. Publishers are not necessarily abandoning SEO. Instead, they are reorganizing audience teams, investing in off-platform distribution and building workflows for both human readers and AI systems.
At USA Today Co., the new structure will emphasize centralized production, audience growth in key coverage areas and distribution beyond the company’s own sites. Richardson said the team should be in place within six to eight weeks.
The business pressure is clear. USA Today Co.’s second-quarter revenue fell 8.3% from a year earlier, while digital advertising revenue declined 9.2%, partly because of lower page views. The company is hiring an executive editor of audience and digital production to lead the group. The team will include 23 to 30 people and oversee audience strategy across web, apps, newsletters, social, video, search and emerging platforms.
A company spokesperson declined to say how many employees would be affected by the layoffs.
The New York Times is making a different kind of change. Christine Liang, who spent seven years leading technical SEO at the Times, announced that she has moved into a new role overseeing AI and off-platform discovery.
“The way we search the internet has changed. So has the way we read,” Liang wrote on LinkedIn. “People increasingly get their news through AI-mediated pathways.”
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The Washington Post made a similar move in October 2025, when it hired Kyle Sutton as its first head of SEO and AI discovery.
Barry Adams, founder of news-publisher consultancy Polemic Digital, told Digiday that publishers are putting more effort into channels Google does not control, including apps, newsletters, puzzles, podcasts and video.
“The focus has shifted from chasing clicks to chasing loyalty,” he said.
Publishers are experimenting elsewhere, too. Media Copilot has reported on USA Today Co.’s work with Palantir on audience data and The New York Times’ testing of AI summaries in site search.
The legal fight over AI is unfolding alongside those newsroom changes. The Seattle Times and Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft last week over the use of their journalism, while the Justice Department has backed OpenAI’s fair-use position in The New York Times’ copyright case.
For publishers, the post-Google newsroom is not one without SEO, but rather one where search sits alongside newsletters, apps, social video and AI discovery.
As USA Today Co. centralizes audience and digital production, The New York Times has created a role focused on AI and off-platform discovery. Both moves show how publishers are broadening audience strategy beyond traditional search as referral traffic comes under pressure.
