MWCNEWS vs VIEWS
What really gets covered in Barcelona?
We looked at the interviews, opinions and announcements that earned coverage around MWC 2026. There's a big opportunity for thought-leading opinions.
of MWC coverage was opinion-led.
More than one in three articles in the selected publications were led by interviews or industry views.
The views outside the news
MWC is hectic. Companies spend months deciding what they can announce in Barcelona, while a sizeable part of the press covering the show is busy asking the industry for opinions.
In the earned coverage we analysed from MWC 2026, more than one in three articles were led by interviews or industry opinion. News was still the biggest category, at 46% of our selected sample, but opinion-led reporting accounted for 36%. Another 13% was independent editorial analysis. Put more simply, the show generated plenty of coverage that was not driven by somebody issuing a press release.
That should be encouraging to the business arriving without a blockbuster product launch or a partnership with a major name.
There is considerably more to an MWC media programme than the announcement schedule.
And yet, we still see media plans built around a list of announcements followed by a list of executives “available to discuss” said news. Looking back at past editions of MWC suggests that is leaving an opportunity on the table. The question to ask now is not just what news you will have for the Fira, but what you want the industry to be thinking about when everybody is there.
How the coverage broke down
The show is built for announcements, but the space given to what people think is far too substantial to not plan for.
Opinion-led reporting included interviews and substantive industry views. Independent editorial analysis is counted separately.
Share of Temono's selected earned-media coverage from MWC 2026
How we selected the publications
We reviewed earned coverage published between 23 February and 31 March 2026, excluding identified paid or sponsored items, duplicated material and syndicated wires. Hoovering up absolutely every piece of MWC coverage would weight all publications equally, which isn't how influence works in practice. Equally, just going with the titles publishing the most would naturally skew towards news output. We drew on our combined years of MWC experience to select 30 publications, balancing coverage volume with industry influence and relevance to the audiences our clients want to reach. That inevitably involves some subjective judgement, but we think it gives a good picture of the editorial opportunity available at MWC.
Before you pitch the interview, pitch the argument.
Journalists’ diaries are packed at MWC. A senior executive who can “talk about the future of AI, 6G and digital transformation” unfortunately sounds like half the people attending. That is not much of a reason for a journalist to give up one of their precious half-hour gaps in the schedule.
An interview pitch should tell the reporter what they are going to get. What does the spokesperson believe the industry is getting wrong? Which assumption do they want to challenge? Why do they think the market should go in a different direction, and what have they seen that supports the argument? Those are the beginnings of an interview. A list of topics is just a list of topics.
“The interviews that are the most interesting to me are the ones that expose tensions or challenges the industry is facing.”
Diana Goovaerts from Fierce says she is generally more interested in the “why” than the “what”. If somebody is unveiling a product built on telco APIs, for instance, she wants to know why those APIs have taken so long to gain traction and whether the industry has been thinking too narrowly about their use. A product gives her a reason to ask the question. The question is where the interesting story might be.
This is where thought leadership earns the name. It should move an industry conversation forward, challenge an established view or make a persuasive case for a direction the sector ought to take.
That does not mean manufacturing controversy, insisting on a position nobody else holds or only making predictions that are certain to be correct. Markets change, and an executive might ultimately be wrong. Better that than restricting every spokesperson to a set of heavily approved statements with which nobody could possibly disagree. Prepare the argument properly, anticipate the objections and give the journalist enough of it in the initial pitch to decide whether there is a conversation worth having.
Opinions that grabbed the media
An argument worth examining
Two Eridan executives spoke to Fierce Network about the case for distributed MIMO over large massive MIMO installations when adding network capacity. It was a technical conversation, but also a commercial one. How much power does each approach consume? What does it cost to install capacity before demand is there? Are the performance claims persuasive? The resulting article, published on 9 March, explored the much bigger question of whether the industry was choosing the right architecture.
That is the opportunity a smaller specialist vendor should be looking for. MWC may have its headline themes and keynotes, but journalists do not abandon their normal beats because the conference organisers have decided to talk about AI. A subject does not have to be fashionable across the entire exhibition hall to be worth a conversation with the right reporter. It does have to be specific, interesting and supported by somebody who knows what they are talking about.
Read the Eridan interviewMore than one kind of interview
Tokens instead of gigabytes?
Iain Morris’s interview with Jio Platforms CEO Mathew Oommen took on an even larger argument. Oommen suggested that AI could shift the economics of telecoms away from the familiar price-per-gigabyte model towards compute and tokens. Morris had plenty to examine, including how the proposition worked, whether it was fully formed and what it might mean for operators.
Read the Jio featureWhere does satellite fit?
There were different versions of the same principle elsewhere. Rob Pegoraro, also at Light Reading, talked to Skylo CEO Parthsarathi Trivedi about the prospect of satellite connectivity becoming a seamless extension of terrestrial mobile networks. That opened the door to competing satellite approaches, standards and the limitations of services available today. It was a story about the way a market might develop, not a guided tour of Skylo’s product catalogue.
Read the Skylo interview
“Pretty much everything I write from MWC comes from conversations with executives rather than press releases. If it’s someone I don’t know, it helps to have an idea of their views on where the industry is going. An interesting perspective, perhaps even a contrarian one, gives me a reason to meet them.”
Other coverage examples
Spread the spotlight.
There is a stubborn bit of PR folklore that journalists will not interview people with a marketing or sales job title. That’s a shorter version of a longer sentiment that has been squished over time. Journalists will not interview people with a marketing or sales job title who can only talk in marketing speak about how great their company and its products are. Nobody wants half an hour of approved product messages, but that is a problem with what the person can say, not necessarily the title on their business card.
In our separate review of classifiable corporate spokesperson appearances in independently sourced opinion coverage, technology and network roles represented 38%, and CEOs, founders and managing directors 22%. Marketing and hybrid marketing titles, however, still made up 13%.
Who appeared in the opinion coverage?
Kali Pickens, Senior Director of Marketing in Samsung’s Networks Business, is a good example. In an interview with Andrew Wooden at Telecoms.com, she talked through CPUs and GPUs for network AI workloads, the economics of different choices and the possibility of a less disruptive move towards 6G. It was a technically detailed conversation. Her title did not prevent it from being one.
For other conversations and other companies, a founder or CTO might be the more obvious spokesperson, but choosing the person should follow the argument. Who actually understands the problem, has a view worth hearing and can sustain the conversation when the reporter pushes back? An impressive title without those qualities is a poor trade.
Samsung / Telecoms.comWhat will be 2027’s big topics?
Having a good thought leadership opinion can open the door to coverage at MWC, but what topics will be hotly debated?
For companies building an interview and thought-leadership programme rather than just a release schedule, these are the five conversations we would focus on.
Select a segment to explore the argument.
AI must prove it works and show its workings
There will be enough AI launches at MWC to keep an entire newsroom busy. What is still worth asking is where the operational and commercial results are catching up with the claims. Are operators cutting costs or adding capacity? Which network workloads need new architectures, and which are being given an AI label because it helps the story? If an executive thinks the industry is indulging in AI-washing, Diana’s advice is a useful test. Explain why, and say what ought to happen instead.
6G and ISAC have a business case to make
Integrated sensing and communications opens up intriguing possibilities for drone detection, industrial systems and robotics. It also lends itself to demonstrations that are rather easier to admire than to price. Which capabilities are genuinely new, which could be delivered sooner using existing networks, and what would a customer pay for? A company with an informed answer has the makings of a better discussion than another prediction that 6G will change everything.
Satellite connectivity has to work outside the demo
Non-terrestrial networks will produce more partnerships, launches and promises of seamless coverage. The interesting debates are moving towards interoperability, spectrum, service quality, capacity and who makes money. There are already competing answers to those questions, as the Skylo and Starlink stories demonstrated. Few journalists need to be told again that satellites can connect hard-to-reach places. They may want to hear why one approach will work commercially where another might struggle.
Private networks and robotics need evidence
Private 5G has spent long enough being described as a market about to take off. A repeatable deployment, credible economics or a frank explanation of why a particular market has been slower than expected would go further. The robots will draw crowds in Barcelona, naturally. The more useful discussion for industry media is what those machines actually require from connectivity and whether customers are paying for it.
Energy, security and voice should not be afterthoughts
More compute changes the conversation around network energy use, costs and resilience. Post-quantum security offers plenty of scope to distinguish urgent engineering work from speculation. Voice is also considerably more interesting than the old claim that it has become a commodity. Translation, transcription, call assurance and AI agents create real questions about trust, deployment and customers’ willingness to pay. Each is an opportunity for an executive with experience to tell the industry something it does not already know.
Start planning the views now. Not on the flight to Barcelona.
All of which makes this a particularly good time to work out what your people want to say at MWC 2027. The announcement programme will take care of itself to a point. The more valuable preparation is often getting the right executives in a room and asking where they believe the industry is heading, which accepted wisdom they question and what they are prepared to argue for in public.
Two or three properly developed positions will go further than a dozen vaguely topical talking points. Test the evidence, work through the awkward questions and decide who can speak about each position without reaching for the corporate script. Then look at what the journalists you want to meet are writing about. A reporter who will spend thirty minutes testing a commercial thesis needs a different approach from one who wants a knowledgeable voice on a developing story before the next deadline. Tell each of them what conversation you are proposing, rather than making them guess.
Leave some room in the diary for stories that nobody has announced yet. The Spectrum Effect example is a reminder that the news breaking around you can be every bit as useful as the news you planned to announce, but responsiveness works best when the thinking has already been done.
Barcelona will not be short of press releases next year. It probably will not be short of executives offering to discuss AI, either. The companies that do the work now to develop a point of view, and have the confidence to put it in front of the right journalist, give themselves another way into the conversation.
We know our way around Barcelona.
Temono has exclusively focused on telecoms and digital infrastructure for over twenty years. Our team has helped countless technology companies make more of MWC. Between us, we've secured speaking opportunities, helped clients win GLOMO Awards, arranged hundreds of media and analyst briefings, and landed coverage across the specialist trade press, national media and broadcast outlets.
We've seen what works, what gets lost in the noise and how much difference the right conversation can make.
If you're planning for MWC 2027, now is a good time to start thinking about more than your announcement schedule. What do you want to say about the industry? Which conversations do you want to influence? And how can you make sure the right journalists hear those views?
