From Messy Archives to Monetizable Intelligence: What INMA’s Media Tech & AI Week Made Clear

Brooke Hartley Moy, Founder & CEO, Infactory

Last week at INMA’s Media Tech & AI Week in San Francisco, the conversation shifted from what AI can do for journalism to what journalism must do for AI.

During The Value of Content: What Is It Worth in an AI-Powered World? Panel, I was struck by how often one word surfaced—messy. Messy archives. Messy data. Messy metadata. Every publisher, regardless of size or sophistication, is sitting on a mountain of unstructured content that is rich in value but nearly impossible to commercialize in its current state.

The Hidden Cost of Messy Data

We all know the story: decades of reporting, footage, interviews, and notes—what one speaker called “the reporter’s notebook of the internet,”  live in silos. Even organizations that have invested in tagging or automation quickly realize that inconsistent metadata, uncertain rights, and missing context make their archives unfit for AI-era licensing.

The truth is, messy data means missed revenue. Until archives are structured, searchable, and rights-safe, they can’t be part of the agentic web that’s reshaping discovery and monetization.

AI Will Reward the Organized

As we move from the search era to the answer era, and now into the action era, the publishers who will thrive are those whose archives are machine-readable, rights-verified, and queryable at scale. In an ecosystem where AI agents are making decisions on behalf of users, your data either surfaces or disappears.

At Infactory, we think of this as turning archives into intelligence. Our Video Intelligence technology doesn’t just tag footage; it understands what’s in each frame and then builds the structured, rights-aware foundation that enables safe AI training and monetization.

Clean Data Is a Collective Imperative

INMA’s debrief emphasized something I deeply agree with: this isn’t an individual race. Publishers need shared standards and collective frameworks for metadata, licensing, and discoverability, because the agentic web won’t wait for every archive to catch up. Clean data is not glamorous work, but it’s the most critical investment news organizations can make in the next 12 months.

As I left the conference, one takeaway stood out: AI doesn’t replace human creativity; it depends on human-organized information.

If we want journalism and original content to remain valuable in the age of automation, we must start by cleaning our data house.