The top editor at Sky News has explained why the channel can no longer rely on covering “commoditised” breaking news.

Jonathan Levy, managing director and executive editor at Sky News, said although the newsbrand is strong at covering breaking news “by heritage”, this has become a “much more commoditised and competitive space”.

Sky News is currently implementing a plan to be a “premium video-first newsroom built for the digital future” with less reliance on live, breaking TV news by 2030.

It has just announced its planned first forays into paid content both coming this summer: a subscription-based app specifically for defence content and paid podcasts with perks like ad-free listening and bonus episodes.

Speaking at Press Gazette’s Future of Media Trends event in London last week, Levy said: “By heritage, we’re a breaking live news organisation, and we’re very comfortable doing breaking live. We’re very good at it. We all love doing it. If you go into the Sky News newsroom when a big story is breaking, it’s our happy place. We all click into that very readily.

“I think there’s a realisation that that’s becoming just a much more commoditised and competitive space. When a big story breaks I’ll get five, six, seven alerts at the same time. So we knew that we couldn’t rely on being primarily that.”

Levy said big breaking news days, from the Manchester synagogue attack and Bondi beach shooting in December to former Foreign Office chief Olly Robbins giving evidence about the appointment of Peter Mandelson as US ambassador last week, will continue to get people “in the door” before they can hopefully be encouraged to stay for “the deeper, richer content”.

But covering breaking news online may make the Sky News website more resilient to the impact of Google’s AI Overviews, which have been linked to global newsbrand search traffic falling by a third in the year to November but has affected publishers unevenly.

Levy said: “Search has been an aspect of how we found our audience with our text journalism. It’s never been all that we’re about, or even mainly what we’re about. So maybe the impact of this has been less for us than it has been for other news organisations.

“Also because a lot of our text copy has been around breaking news stories, I think that’s been less impacted by AI summaries… [But] there’s no doubt that it is going to have a big impact.”

Levy said focusing on more in-depth analysis also helps insulate the channel against the impact of AI summaries.

He referenced a 26-minute video report produced this month by chief correspondent Stuart Ramsay and his team in Cuba about the impact of the US oil blockade on the country, and political editor Beth Rigby’s analysis of Robbins’s select committee testimony.

“For us, that type of journalism is less vulnerable to technological disruption by AI than other types, so we want to originate as much as possible, because we think that’s one of the ways that we’ll have people coming back and consuming our journalism long into the future,” Levy said.

He added that this is “why a push harder into video on digital platforms makes a lot of sense, to be honest. From a consumer point of view, there’s going to be a big impact around text journalism.

“We think video will be less impacted for obvious reasons, and also just origination. For us, it is about original journalism as much as possible. A straight news lead is more threatened by the technology we’re talking about, AI technology.”

Sky News has ‘breakthrough’ for digital video with Iran war story

There has been a “huge appetite” for Sky News journalism about the Iran war, Levy said, citing in particular a “big pick up” in both consumption and engagement with video, mainly short-form, on the Sky News app as well as longer-form videos on Youtube.

Some 597.5 million minutes were spent with Sky News online (across its website, app and third-party platforms like Apple News, MSN and Yahoo) in the UK in March, a nine-month high, even though its monthly audience was its lowest in 2026 so far on 17.7 million people.

Levy said: “We’ve found the consumption of video on digital platforms has been a huge breakthrough for us in this particular story,” describing this as “encouraging from a coverage and a strategic point of view”.

He said the Iran war is a “difficult story” both because of the quantity of pictures and events coming out of the Middle East and the difficulty for journalists to be there on the ground – although international affairs editor Dominic Waghorn was one of few international journalists able to enter Iran.

Levy said the two main pillars of Sky News for the Iran war story have been “eyewitness journalism, which is our favoured way of covering stories where we can. And then a lot of analysis, especially of the military and economic implications.” He said analysis videos by economics and data editor Ed Conway and military analyst Michael Clarke had proved “very popular with consumers”.

Tiktok part of ‘primary strategy’ despite limited revenue and referral opportunities

Tiktok has seen “phenomenal” recent growth, Levy added, noting that Sky News now has 11 million followers on the platform.

“In order for each incremental one million to get to ten [million] took quite a long time, and we’ve actually got from ten to 11 very quickly. And a lot of that has been a mixture of the Iran war primarily, but also a bit the Artemis launch. So actually, this year has been very good for us on Tiktok.”

However Tiktok remains a “reach opportunity” rather than a revenue one for Sky News.

“We’re judicious about pure reach opportunities, because much of what we’re doing is also about generating engagement and communities around our journalism and our talent, and less about broad reach,” Levy said.

“Why we decided to put Tiktok as part of our primary strategy is because of the different types of audiences that it reaches. The Sky News audience on our own and operated platforms tends to be older. It tends to skew male. What we can reach on Tiktok is a younger female audience.

“It doesn’t drive back to our platform via Tiktok at all. There’s very little referral, if any at all. But what we are doing with that – in a fairly straightforward way, it doesn’t require that much reprocessing of our content but it requires some – is we’re getting our journalists and our journalism in front of a group of people who wouldn’t be coming on the Sky News app or less even on TV.”

Levy said prioritising digital video has required an “adjustment” in how it is produced, including in the tone and the personality required of the presenters “and combining that with our trusted, impartial journalism”.

“It hasn’t just been a question of chopping up linear TV and putting it on digital,” Levy added. “It’s about inverting that and actually making video for digital platforms the first thing we think about and actually, in some ways that flowing onto TV – certainly in an on demand way.”

He said the TV channel is often now “receiving rather than being the originator of” the storytelling being produced.

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