#20 The Change Tax: Why Print-Era Hierarchy Is Killing News Media in the AI Age. Selma Stern, Independent Advisor

Most people in media have not heard the term "change tax," but they have felt it. Selma Stern describes it as work that keeps coming back without ever getting resolved, like the same alignment meeting held three times in a year, with nothing decided each time.

In this episode, host Nils Ove Håland Riise talks with Selma Stern, an independent advisor to media companies. Stern has worked as Chief of Staff at Axel Springer, Chief Membership Officer at Business Insider, and Chief Customer Officer at Fortune, after starting her career at BCG.

Her main point centers on how newsroom structures have not kept pace with how the work itself has changed. In the print era, roles were fixed and predictable. An editor-in-chief's job description barely changed from year to year, and the workflow, from writer to editor to press, was linear and well understood. Digital broke that. Editors now need to work fluently with product, data, and technology teams that speak a different language and move on a different rhythm. AI is accelerating that shift again, requiring even more flexibility and cross-team coordination than the digital transition already demanded. Stern argues that many media companies are still organized the way they were for print, and that structure is becoming a real constraint as the pace of change increases.

To see whether this pattern holds up across the industry, Stern analyzed employee reviews from 20 publishers in 9 countries, looking for language about friction (silos, unclear ownership) versus language about integration (clear roles, teams working well together). Publishers with the most friction language were shrinking or had recently laid off staff. Publishers that were growing, including the New York Times, the Economist, and Le Monde, showed more integration language than friction.

That pattern shows up clearly in a real example. In the same week in February 2026, the New York Times announced record subscriber growth while the Washington Post's struggles were widely reported. Stern argues the real difference is not who owns each company, but how each one is organized.

The episode ends with a look ahead: micropayments, AI agents that could buy articles on a reader's behalf, and whether subscriptions are still the right model for news.

Topics covered:

• What the change tax is, in Selma Stern's own words
• Why print-era roles and workflows do not translate to digital and AI
• How editors now need to work across product, data, and technology teams
• How Stern measured this across 20 publishers using employee reviews

• New York Times and Washington Post: same week, opposite results
• Micropayments, AI agents, and the future of subscriptions

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You can read more about the change-tax here:

https://asternlook.substack.com/p/the-change-tax?triedRedirect=true

Find Selma Stern:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/selmastern/