In the year ahead, publishers will need to spend a lot more time thinking about their digital infrastructure.

Most newsrooms don’t spend a lot of time thinking about their value chain, a business school concept that tries to explain all the activities and processes that go into creating a product or service. A value chain analysis attempts to explain how companies create defensible strategic advantages by categorizing all the components that lead to a company’s finished product.

A value chain for news would start with the reporters and producers who find stories on their beat. It would include the editors who refine that work and the digital producers who package it for distribution. It would include the business side teams who sell subscriptions and advertising. But it would also include external actors like the social networks and search engines that help audiences find news relevant to them. A high-achieving MBA student (and anyone who’s worked in news for the last 15 years) might note that those external parties have gradually “captured” more value by disrupting how news is discovered and distributed: Search engines and social media platforms have won strategic leverage and profit from media companies by training audiences to seek out news in their ecosystem, rather than through publishers’ owned and operated channels.

Going into 2025, we need an industry-wide assessment of how our value chain functions because technical and regulatory forces will conspire to make our strategic position less defensible.

The Republican vision for Donald Trump’s second term includes rolling back Section 230 and making it easier for investigators to seize phone records and emails from journalists. Both of those proposals would accelerate the transformation of the internet into a splinternet—a collection of networks where access to information varies depending on where you are.

Digital distribution is already fragmented; it will only become more so if digital infrastructure companies lose their liability shield. Without the protections of Section 230, hosting companies might think twice about working with aggressive investigative news outlets because of the risk of SLAPP suits from powerful interests. Search engines might be pressured to change how their algorithms rank relevant information.

News leaders won’t just need to wrestle with how changing search and social algorithms impact news discovery: They’ll need to make choices about where their data is hosted and what service providers they use for fundamental operations. News organizations could go offline if their CDN provider or host decides that delivering news isn’t worth the cost of becoming a regulatory target.

This kind of analysis will be especially important for publishers who start deploying AI products. Right now, we have too much focus on deploying AI solutions that are a light wrapper around a commercially available API — basically providing an easy way for journalists to use ChatGPT from within their CMS. To create strategically resonant AI tools, we’ll need innovators willing to leverage fine-tuning or some other investment to build a more valuable solution. Without that, our AI products won’t accrue any “value,” they’ll just let companies like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic squeeze publishers more.

Developing a deep understanding of what drives the news business will be essential to keeping our newsrooms sustainable. Building a systemic picture of how we connect with — and make money from—our audiences will let us make smart choices about how we prioritize new initiatives.

All of this will be a lot to keep track of: Small newsrooms and independent journalists will suffer the most. Big organizations will need to break down silos so editors and executives benefit from the expertise of technical teams. But amidst this turmoil, there will be winners. Outlets that spend the time to understand the shifting value chain will have a chance to transform risk into opportunity.