Arc XP launches Compass: A home page that knows who's reading it, and a newsroom that still decides what leads. Sep 21, 2026, 08:59 ET Arc XP Compass recognizes a returning reader, remembers what they read last, and shows them what they missed. Editors still decide what leads. WASHINGTON, Sept. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - Arc XP, the media technology platform built inside The Washington Post, launched Arc XP Compass, a personalization engine for news home pages and section fronts. Arc XP Compass tells a returning reader from a first-time one, remembers what each read last, and rebuilds the page around it. It is the experience Instagram and TikTok trained a generation to expect, applied to news. The difference is who sets the priorities: editors still decide what leads. Publishers just crossed a threshold. Social media and video networks have, for the first time, overtaken publishers' own websites and apps as the most common way people get news, used by 54% of respondents across 48 markets against 51% for news organizations' own sites and apps, according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism's Digital News Report 2026. Catch Me Up is the clearest example. A wildfire breaks out Monday, and a reader follows the first evacuation orders that night. She is off the news for three days. By Thursday, the story has moved four times: containment lines held, two neighborhoods cleared to return, the county opened an investigation into the local utility, the casualty count revised. Arc XP Compass knows she was here and where she stopped, and opens with a recap of what changed while she was gone, in order, built from the newsroom's own reporting rather than a generated summary. A first-time visitor sees none of it. Behind that summary, every update on the fire sits in a single storyline called Dynamic Timelines, instead of scattering across a dozen separate links. Editors keep their hands on the wheel: Editorial Priority Controls lets them pin, boost, or bury any story directly, so the personalization never drifts from the newsroom's own judgment. The pressure is concentrated among younger readers. Among 18-to-24-year-olds, 52% now name social media, video networks or AI chatbots as their main way of getting news, 32 points ahead of the next source. Publishers' own sites and apps are no longer the main source of news for any age group globally. Ten percent worldwide used a standalone AI chatbot for news last week, up from 7% a year earlier, and 16% among under-35s. Referral traffic is fragile too: Google Discover traffic to Reach, the UK's largest commercial news publisher, fell 46% in the second half of 2025, per the company's investor disclosure. A general-purpose chatbot cannot replicate what a newsroom builds over years: an editorial voice, a reader's trust, and an archive of its own reporting. Global trust in answers from AI chatbots sits at 20%, against 37% for news overall. Arc XP calls the approach adaptive discovery. Arc XP Compass is platform-agnostic. It works with any content management system or delivery stack, whether or not a newsroom runs the rest of its site on the Arc XP hybrid CMS platform. "Publishers don't want to hand their relationship with readers over to somebody else's algorithm. They want a better version of their own front page," said Ryan Gladstone, Director of Product Engineering, Arc XP. "Arc XP Compass lets a newsroom's priorities guide the experience while still meeting each reader where they left off. A chatbot can't do that, and a generic recommendation engine won't respect the newsroom." Availability Arc XP Compass is generally available beginning September 2026. To view a short video of Arc XP Compass, please visit: https://hubs.la/Q04xNZX50 About Arc XP Arc XP is the platform for modern media, built inside The Washington Post, which still runs on it today. Newsrooms, digital publishers, and broadcasters use Arc XP to publish faster, own their audience relationships, and diversify revenue, including The Irish Times, Libération, L'Express, Madsack, Graham Media Group, and Sky News. Arc Intelligence grounds AI in each organization's own content and governance rules, so editors stay in control of what is published. Arc XP supports more than 3,000 sites worldwide, with a migration path proven by publishers who've already made the move. Learn more at www.arcxp.com. Sources for cited statistics: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Digital News Report 2026 (reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2026). Reach figure as reported by Press Gazette, 3 March 2026, and cited in the same report. SOURCE Arc XP

Arc XP, the media technology platform built inside The Washington Post, has launched Arc XP Compass, a personalisation engine for news home pages and section fronts. The tool recognises returning readers, remembers what they have read, and rebuilds the page around their history whilst allowing editors to maintain control over editorial priorities. The launch comes as social media and video networks have overtaken publishers' own websites and apps as the most common way people access news. According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism's Digital News Report 2026, 54% of respondents across 48 markets now use social platforms, compared to 51% using news organisations' own sites. Arc XP Compass features include "Catch Me Up", which recaps story developments readers missed, and Dynamic Timelines, which consolidates updates into single storylines. The platform is content-management-system agnostic and generally available from September 2026.

Publishers are losing their readers to AI. The Washington Post's tech arm built a solution. Jul 13, 2026, 09:01 ET Arc XP launches Ask The News, giving news publishers a way to answer reader questions with their own journalism - and keep the audience data, conversions, and revenue that AI platforms are quietly capturing. WASHINGTON, July 13, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - Every day, millions of readers who once visited a news site now get their answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews - without the publisher seeing a single pageview, collecting a data point, or earning a cent. Arc XP, the media operating system built by The Washington Post, is launching a product designed to stop that. New data underscore the urgency. According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026 (published June 2026), only 4% of AI chatbot users say they always or often click through to original news sources - compared to 19% from search. As readers migrate their questions to AI, publishers are watching referral traffic go with them. Ask The News is an AI-powered answer layer that publishers embed directly on their own digital properties. When a reader has a question, Ask The News answers it using the publisher's own reporting - with attribution, editorial guardrails, and guards against the open-web hallucination risk that defines generic AI tools. The publisher owns the interaction, the intent data it generates, and every business opportunity that flows from it. "The industry has spent years worrying about Google and social platforms. The next threat is quieter and faster: readers learning to ask AI instead of visiting a news site. Ask The News puts publishers back in that conversation," said Joey Marburger, Vice President of Content Intelligence, Arc XP. "The question is whether publishers own that moment of reader curiosity, or whether someone else does." For decades, the article has been the primary unit of digital news engagement. Ask The News introduces a new layer built around the reader's question. Rather than requiring audiences to scan headlines or leave a publisher's site to understand a story, Ask The News surfaces relevant questions, allows readers to ask follow-ups, and synthesizes answers from the publisher's own journalism. The product automatically declines to answer when there is insufficient source reporting to do so confidently - a guardrail that sharply distinguishes it from general-purpose AI tools. "Ask The News has the potential to change how audiences experience our journalism," said Martin Kautz, Head of Media Technologies at RND - RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland. "It gives readers a more intuitive way to explore our reporting while helping us preserve control of the reader relationship and better understand what people want to know." The product launches with three core capabilities. Conversational Embeds allow publishers to deploy Ask The News across articles, homepages, and apps, with auto-generated suggested questions and a natural-language interface grounded in the publisher's reporting. A Subscription Gateway meters answers rather than articles, presenting a conversion prompt after a reader has already received value - a higher-intent moment than a traditional paywall. And Contextual Advertising with IAB Topic Intelligence classifies reader questions and answers in real time, generating intent-level signals that route through a publisher's existing ad stack without surrendering audience data to a third party. "Search shows links. Generic AI gives answers from the open web. Ask The News answers with a publisher's journalism, rules, and business model," Marburger added. "This is about building a durable reader habit: when you have a question, you go to your trusted news organization first." Ask The News is now available to Arc XP publisher partners, with a standalone deployment for non-Arc XP publishers via a JavaScript embed. Arc XP plans to expand the product into a broader intelligence platform, with future capabilities including personalized briefings, saved conversations, topic tracking, editorial intelligence dashboards, and proactive reader experiences. Link to 1-minute video demonstrating Ask The News functionality: https://hubs.la/Q04p95kY0 About Arc XP Arc XP is the content platform and operating system built to power growth for ambitious media companies. Developed by The Washington Post, Arc XP is used by leading media organizations worldwide, including The Irish Times, Libération, L'Express, Madsack, Graham Media Group, and Sky News. Arc XP's platform helps media companies innovate rapidly, own audience relationships, and grow independent revenue. Arc XP supports more than 3,000 sites globally and delivers billions of pageviews each month. Learn more at www.arcxp.com. SOURCE Arc XP