Welcome to this week’s Press Gazette Future of Media US newsletter on Friday, 21 November.

🗽 Press Gazette has just returned from our bi-annual outing to New York where I met more than 100 publishers, editors, commercial and tech folks.

The decline of Google search as a source of referral traffic was top of mind at our Media Strategy Network USA event held at the People Inc building.

It’s also top of the inbox for Forbes CEO Sherry Phillips who was this week’s Press Gazette podcast VIP guest.

If you asked your Google search bar a year ago for a list of the richest people in America it would probably have sent you to The Forbes 400 – a painstaking piece of journalism. Today Google keeps that traffic for itself by serving readers with an AI summary based on Forbes’s work.

Traffic to Forbes as more than halved this year as a result.

For Phillips, a renewed focus on in-person events and the title’s core community has been its response to losing the scale of audience Google once powered.

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🤖 The keynote speaker at our New York event was actually a fellow Brit (a Scotsman to be precise) – People Inc chief innovation officer Jon Roberts.

The former theoretical physicist has set his giant brain towards figuring out how to make journalism pay in the AI-driven post-Google age.

Reassuringly for us humans he said: “As a digital publisher we embrace AI for all its benefits, but AI will never change the fact that humans make our brands what they are. Channelling human insight, expertise, inspiration and creativity for the benefit of all is what makes our brands special. We will always be distinctly human.”

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💰 Also speaking at our USA event was Bloomberg Media chief operating officer Julia Beizer who said that engagement, not scale, was her team’s main focus.

She also revealed an intriguing use of AI technology to aid product development and testing of marketing messages.

“We’ve taken our customer segmentation, so every way we understand our users, and we’ve created custom GPTs for each one….

“This has been so fun and transformative for the staff because they’ve had essentially, like, a work buddy to help them figure out how to optimise to fit the needs of our users.”

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📈On Press Gazette this week:

1) Metro to cut staff as web traffic declines and focus shifts to social video growth

The title will “focus resources in areas with the highest potential for growth”