“It’s not: Some people do features, some people do spot stories. You’re commanding your beat. You’re doing everything,” said Jamie Heller, Business Insider’s editor-in-chief.
It’s a Tuesday morning news meeting at Business Insider’s headquarters in New York’s Financial District. More than a dozen editors have gathered in the conference room, while several more chime in remotely on Zoom.
Heller is shouting out senior correspondent Hugh Langley, who recently ran a feature on Google employees protesting the Pentagon’s use of the company’s AI products. It was a follow-up to his exclusive on leaked internal messages showing that Google is “leaning more” into national security contracts.
“He had a scoop, he had a follow-on spot, he had a discourse piece, and then another spot. It’s an example of how the work should flow,” said Heller, who joined Business Insider in September 2024 after more than 20 years at The Wall Street Journal.
Today, editors are discussing how best to frame their coverage of AI-related layoffs. Coinbase, the crypto exchange, has just cut several hundred employees in its attempt to become “AI-native.” Editors in London have been on the news for hours, and are handing off coverage to their New York counterparts. Heller is pushing for an exclusive.
“Have we called them for an interview?” she asks.
Business Insider says that since Heller joined the organization, the amount of “original content” it publishes has more than doubled. In 2024, the company says, about 40% of its content was scoops, exclusives, and other original stories. Today, that content makes up more than 80% of its output, as the publication has made a concerted effort to move away from news aggregation and break its own news. Last year, the newsroom landed 788 scoops, the most it’s ever recorded annually, former CEO Barbara Peng wrote in a recent memo.
Business Insider is trying to overhaul its editorial strategy as the digital news industry reckons with major traffic declines. Google’s AI Overviews and chatbot products like ChatGPT are killing traditional search traffic. Social platforms like Facebook and X have deprioritized news links.
In May 2025, Business Insider laid off 21% of its staff. “We must be structured to endure extreme traffic drops outside our control,” Peng wrote in a memo to staff that month. “We’re reducing our overall company to a size where we can absorb that volatility.”
On May 14, the week after I visited Business Insider’s offices, Peng announced another layoff of about 10 employees. Business Insider has around 250 people in its newsroom and nearly 500 employees across the company.
The May 14 layoffs make 2026 the fourth year in a row that Business Insider cut newsroom positions. Days later, Peng announced her own departure from the company. She has since been replaced by interim CEO Christian Baesler, who has been a senior advisor to Business Insider parent company Axel Springer.
Despite the continued contraction of its editorial staff and the leadership shakeup, Business Insider’s turn away from aggregation has shown some early signs of success — at least when it comes to audience engagement. In the first quarter of 2026, stories marked as “exclusive” saw almost two times the subscription conversions of non-exclusive stories, the company told me.
“Business Insider picked up a lot of other people’s stuff, which, to a certain extent, is a service to readers, but I felt long term, to develop an engaged audience that loves us and is coming back, it has to be for our stuff,” Heller told me in May.
“I love traffic. I want as much of it as possible, and I’m happy to get it from platforms,” she said. “But we need to own our destiny, have our own relationships with an audience that is going to be coming back to us directly on a regular basis. That is how we’re going to succeed over time.”
“The line between original content and borderline theft gets awfully blurry,” then-Reuters reporter Ryan McCarthy wrote in a 2011 blog post titled “Business Insider, over-aggregation, and the mad grab for traffic.”
The criticism was loud enough that in 2013, Blodget wrote a public response. “We assume the knee-jerk anti-aggregation attitude at some companies stems from the era in which big media organizations were like hydrants in the desert — the only place to find news and information,” he wrote in a post titled “Thank you for aggregating us!” “Now, of course, media organizations are like hydrants in the ocean and readers are drowning in choices.”
“Business Insider sits at the sweet spot of digital content: high traffic, low cost, with a combination of sassy voices and viral content,” David Carr wrote in The New York Times in 2014, adding, “While the ambitions of the journalism may be very different, Business Insider now has traffic that rivals The Wall Street Journal.”
Today, though, the aggregated posts that once got such high traffic are swept up in a flood of AI-generated summaries. In Google Search, AI Overviews display short-form article summaries above the fold. ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity can output summaries of trending news topics in seconds. Sometimes these outputs link to the publications that broke the story, and often they link out to aggregated articles — but either way, clickthrough rates are in the single digits at best.
It’s a perilous moment for newsrooms that made aggregation a pillar of their editorial strategy. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism noted in a January survey of more than 280 news publishers worldwide that “the majority of surveyed news executives believe that future success lies in being more distinctive, even if that means losing some overall reach and reducing the amount of general news.”
In 2023, Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Axel Springer, wrote in a letter to staff that AI tools would soon be better at the “aggregation of information” than journalists, reported The Guardian. “Understanding this change is essential to a publishing house’s future viability,” he wrote. “Only those who create the best original content will survive.”
Business Insider had launched a paywall, BI Prime, for its exclusive reporting in 2017. Under editor-in-chief Nicholas Carlson, it built out its bench of staff reporters and expanded its special projects and investigations work, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2022 for an illustrated account of a Uyghur woman’s experience in a Chinese internment camp. But senior editors told me that Heller’s arrival in the fall of 2024 marked a major shift in editorial priorities away from aggregation, and a significant newsroom restructure.
“I think the first thing I remember [Jamie] changing almost immediately was, we’re not going to aggregate anymore, and if you want to match that story you got to go match it yourself,” said Cadie Thompson, deputy news chief and executive editor, who has worked at Business Insider for more than a decade.
Rewrites of other outlets’ original reporting would no longer fly. Reporters were expected to independently confirm news with their own sourcing. An analysis piece would require a new story framing that could “move it forward,” as Thompson put it. Many general assignment reporters who had historically churned out aggregations were given beats for the first time and expected to stay on top of major industry or company developments.
Heller hired the publication’s first-ever standards editor, Tracy Connor, the former editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast. The standards desk has been key to scoops and investigations, which have required more rigor around right of reply, comment-line placement, and the handling of leaked documents and anonymous sourcing.
“As told tos” — polished firsthand narratives based on reporter interviews — have long ranked among Business Insider’s most-read stories. They tend to be advice-framed stories on topics like side hustles, job searches, lifestyle, and personal finance. (Some recent headlines: “I shaved my beard because I was worried it made me look older. Perception matters even more in the age of AI,” “I maxed out a credit card, traded in my car, and still struggled to afford the World Cup. Then I found a WhatsApp group“). But Thompson said they’ve been working on bringing the format into their news coverage.
When Spirit Airlines shuttered earlier this year, Business Insider ran an “as told to” detailing a flight attendant’s experience of losing his job. Similar stories ran regularly as layoffs swept through major tech companies, including a story on a Meta employee who lost their work visa and an Amazon employee who turned down an offer to come back to the company.
“There’s a lot of ways to be original, and scoops is the most traditional, fundamental way. They’re very important, and we hustle for them. They’re not the only way,” Heller said.
Reworking a newsroom to produce more original journalism is one challenge, but it’s been another to communicate that shift to readers. Last year, Business Insider launched an “exclusive” tag, a blue ribbon that labels original scoops on the site’s homepage and article pages. It also launched a slew of new newsletters, like Tech Memo, First Trade, and CMO Insider, that regularly spotlight industry-specific exclusives.
“We’re constantly showcasing our scoops…and trying to telegraph to the reader this is something that you’re only going to be able to read here,” said Heller. “The most important thing is to show. We have to do it, but we also have to tell.”
These changes have required renegotiating the relationship between the newsroom and the companies it covers. In the past, forwarding along a press release might have been all it took for a comms team to place a story. Earlier this year, Business Insider invited around 100 PR professionals to its headquarters to share the publication’s new coverage priorities and editorial standards. It is a message that has extended into one-on-one meetings with PR contacts, according to Thompson.
“I don’t want the press release, I don’t want the thing you’re gonna give everyone else. I want an exclusive. I want to sit down with this executive,” she said. “We’ve been around for a long time, you can know us one way, but just so we’re clear, here’s what our focus is now.”
Original reporting is also converting subscribers at the story level. In the first quarter of this year, the story with the highest conversion rate (factoring in paywall exposures) was an interactive map of data centers across the U.S., part of a years-long investigation that won a George Polk award earlier this year. The story that led to the most subscriptions was a deep dive into how AI slop killed the resume.
“I’m a firm believer that people are going to pay for something that they can’t get anywhere else,” said Steve Russolillo, who joined Business Insider as chief news editor in 2025 after nine years at The Wall Street Journal. “If we’re aggregating that, by definition, it is something you can get somewhere else.”
At the same time, the subscription business Business Insider launched in 2017 has struggled. In 2020, Blodget set a goal to reach 1 million paying subscribers by 2025. In 2022, the site had around 185,000 subscribers; by 2025, that was down to just 135,000. Last November, Business Insider lifted its paywall for the final weeks of the year to boost advertising impressions, Status reported.
“Subscriptions are part of our business,” Heller told me. “It’s not the only part — we have a diverse array of revenue streams.”
Reporters have been largely on board with the focus on original reporting, said James Rodriguez, a real estate correspondent at Business Insider and secretary of the Insider Union. The union, which represents more than 200 reporters, is currently at the bargaining table for a new contract.
“Original reporting is not possible without humans. Period. Full stop,” Rodriguez said, noting that union members want more guardrails on AI and its potential to replace their work in that contract. After the 2025 layoffs, former CEO Peng sent a memo to staff saying that the newsroom was going “all-in on AI.” One way that touched down in the newsroom was through an experiment using custom GPTs to publish “quick news stories.” But the pilot has since wound down, with no news stories published on the “AI News Desk” since February and major corrections to some of the most recent stories.
“[Our negotiation] is really trying to codify what management has already said to us,” Rodriguez said, “that original reporting is going to be our North Star moving forward.”
The union is also pushing for a moratorium on layoffs. After the most recent round of layoffs this past May, the union released a statement citing concerns about Business Insider’s “willingness to repeatedly rely on layoffs to make up for poor strategic decisions.”
The cuts in May impacted about 10 jobs, mostly on the legal affairs desk. Heller told me the decision to cut the legal affairs desk was about refocusing the newsroom on core coverage areas like careers and business, and that AI adoption was not a factor in the decision.
“Our whole team needs to be focused on how we can distinguish ourselves and build a dedicated audience that’s super excited for our coverage and coming back for it. Part of that is by making calls on where we can best stand out,” she said. “I’m looking long term on where we’re headed and where we have the right subjects to succeed. I need to make these calls.”
