Director of Editorial Eduardo Suárez on our reporting on journalism in 2025-26

From our Annual Report 2025-26

As the rise of AI kept rippling through the news industry, the Institute’s editorial team documented this powerful technology’s impact on journalism around the world.

Our reporters Gretel Kahn and Marina Adami reported on AI’s impact on freelancers, newsroom unions and journalism education. They explored how journalists are training the very models that might replace them, how GenAI might be changing human writing, which media companies are joining forces against Big Tech, and why it’s so difficult to prove a piece of content was made with AI.

Along with our researcher Felix Simon, Marina launched a monthly newsletter that provides original reporting and fresh analysis into how AI is reshaping newsrooms and news consumption. Both Marina and Gretel have reported on some of the most important journalism conferences, including the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Newsrewired, Nordic AI in Media, our Digital News Report launches, and our own event on AI and the future of news.

As newsrooms experiment with AI, we thought it was important to show how some of these projects were made. Our audience appreciated detailed pieces from innovators such as Jaemark Tordecilla and Jacopo Ottaviani, and an article from four journalists explaining how they created a multi-agent AI system to accelerate their investigation into Russian extremism. We also published essays from leading media leaders such as A. G. Sulzberger, Styli Charalambous and Shuwei Fang.

AI was at the forefront of our work in this academic year, but it was by no means the only issue we covered. We published pieces on micropayments in Africa, an innovative Italian podcast company, a teenage newsroom in Germany, sexual abuse in newsrooms in Kenya and Colombia, the reporters combating health misinformation, the wars that don’t make headlines, the newsrooms digging through the Jeffrey Epstein files, and the growing number of news deserts in Latin America.

We devoted several articles to the traumatic and increasingly common experience of those colleagues forced to report from exile. Our pieces featured brave journalists from Iran, Sudan, Cuba, El Salvador, Venezuela and Myanmar who joined forces with colleagues, tapped into innovative revenue streams, and kept holding power to account from afar.

Our mission is to explore the future of journalism worldwide, and we take this global outlook very seriously, reporting on outlets and countries most publications tend to ignore. This year we’ve published articles on journalism in Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Maldives, the West Bank, Indonesia, and even an article on news outlets whose main goal is to serve the needs of marginalised communities.

Meanwhile, we kept promoting the work of our research team and our own fellowship on our growing digital channels. Almost every piece of research we publish is now translated into Spanish by our colleague Abel Escudero, including our signature Digital News Report. Our audiences on LinkedIn and Instagram are booming, and our newsletters and our daily roundup are now sent to over 36,000 people.

Our colleague Matthew Leake led a strong push into audio and video. He scripted, recorded and edited our Digital News Report podcast series, and developed the look and feel of short vertical videos that have gathered hundreds of thousands of views.

Our new Digital News Report Interactive

In June we launched a new interactive tool showing survey data from some of the variables we’ve been tracking for more than a decade in the Digital News Report. This allows data to be explored across markets, years, and demographics, and figures compared from different countries on issues such as trust in news, misinformation concerns, or news avoidance.

The tool, developed by Lars Verspohl and Ashish Singh in collaboration with our editorial and research teams, includes context about our research, lets anyone download the data behind the charts, and is available in English and Spanish.