Our podcast: Digital News Report 2025. Episode 1: What you need to know

The podcast

What's happening with news media in 2025? In this special episode of Future of Journalism, authors of our Digital News Report 2025 discuss the role of generative AI, trust in news, subscriptions, news avoidance, podcasts and more.

Listen on Spotify | Apple Podcasts

Speakers

Nic Newman is the lead author of the Digital News Report 2025 and is a senior research associate at the Reuters Institute.

Richard Fletcher is a co-author of the Digital News Report and is the Director of Research at the Reuters Institute.

Host Mitali Mukherjee is the Director of the Reuters Institute and is a political economy journalist with more than two decades of experience in TV, print and digital journalism.

Transcript

An alternative media ecosystem | Greater fragmentation of news | Video news consumption | The ascent of news podcasts | Attitudes to AI and news | News avoidance | Trust in news | Paying for news | Turning to news to check information | Cause for optimism

An alternative media ecosystem ↑

Mitali: The alternative media ecosystem, which feels like a little bit of a gradient or a continuum in terms of who we're talking about, there's personalities, there's creators, there's also established news people. What did you find this year in terms of how they're shifting the dial on this news and audience relationship?

Nic: I mean, maybe just to start a little bit by the wider context. So a lot of this is driven by something we've been talking about for a long time, sort of platformisation of news that allows, anybody to create content, to distribute content, but critically also to monetize that content. And I think what we're seeing now is a sort of critical mass around that in a number of countries, not in all countries, but in some countries. India has been doing this for some time, as well as Brazil, but definitely, the United States, that's where you're really seeing changes in our data this year. So obviously, during the recent election, we saw Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, sort of leaning into podcasters, news creators, people like Joe Rogan, the Nelk Boys, reaching audiences that previously, the media is not really able to reach. And then, since he's been in the White House, he's invited some of these alternative figures into press conferences and excluded some traditional media. So it's having political effects as well. And then in terms of our data, we're really seeing a step change in the US, specifically in terms of media habits. So the use of social media and video networks is up six percentage points at the same time as many of the other sources of news have remained pretty flat during a very turbulent political period, dependence on social media is up significantly, particularly with young people. And on top of that, in our data, we've identified a range of individuals who are getting very large audiences indeed. So 22% of our US samples said they'd seen some kind of news from Joe Rogan in the week that we did our polling, which was just around the election time. And then we've also seen Tucker, Carlson, Megyn Kelly, a number of voices, primarily on the right. So that's what's going on the US. But we also see it in other countries, slightly different arrangements. So instead of these influencers supporting the government. In many cases where the government controls, a lot of the media influencers personalities are really providing opposition voices. So sort of different, different ways in which this is being projected in different countries.

Mitali: I want to scratch that point about social media platforms, but also to sort of contextualise for our audiences. As you said, Nic, it's 22% which is a really large number for the US. Markets like LATAM and Asia we're seeing similar trends. And can you talk for a second about what you see, particularly with the audience dynamic? Because that's important, that some of these personalities are tapping into audiences that mainstream media haven't been able to or mainstream media have been seen as sort of less trustworthy by these audience segments,

Nic: I think traditional media is working very well for the elites, if you like, and for sort of people who are interested in news. People who are less interested in news, this is really where we've seen a lot of the social media use, and this is where influencers have definitely made content entertaining. So some of it is obviously mixing news, entertainment, comedy, a whole range of different genres, and that has allowed these influencers to reach people from lower educational backgrounds, but definitely younger people as well, because those are obviously people who are reaching it. So Joe Rogan, for example, in our data, we can clearly see that he's resonating with young men. Tucker Carlson, less with the young, but still people on the right. And so we're seeing some of that partisanship as well. I mean, this is primarily social media, video platforms. And that's the other story, is the growth of TikTok and YouTube, these sort of video platforms which are much more about the sort of the global hits, much less about what you're sharing with your friends.

Greater fragmentation of news ↑

Mitali: Richard, it's the 14th year. So it's not new the fact that these social platforms have become increasingly important. But some of what we're seeing in this report is sort of greater fragmentation, isn't it? You know, talk to us a little bit about what you see across these platforms.

Richard: So we look at how people use platforms for news specifically, of course, people use platforms for lots of different things, but we're just focusing on news. And even just in the last 10 years or so, it's really changed quite a lot. If we look back, sort of 10 years ago, we saw that Facebook was really the most important platform for news in most of the countries we surveyed. Over time, I think the importance of Facebook has declined. And at the same time, what we've seen is newer networks, sometimes instant messaging networks like WhatsApp, sometimes video networks like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, they've kind of taken its place. And consumption of news via these platforms has crept up at the same time that sort of Facebook news use has gone down. And of course, some of these networks, the way that news works on these networks, is very different from how it works on Facebook. We can think of Facebook to some to some extent, kind of replicating what we might think of as a news agenda on other networks. It doesn't really work like that. So, yes, things have become more fragmented. The amount of networks that people are using for news has kind of gone up a lot in the last 10 years. But it's also the character of the kind of news consumption, the form it takes, has also changed alongside the changes in platforms.

Video news consumption ↑

Mitali: And I think if we were to sort of pick another headline, it would be ‘video, video, video,’ which is the kind of pivot that we're seeing amongst audiences. Could you talk a little bit about that graph in terms of the increase that's happened with video and the fact that it's an odd mix now of a podcast being recorded on videos, vodcasts, which is a strange turn of phrase, but, talk to us a little bit about that.

Richard: Yeah. I mean, just to sort of take a step back first, I think it's important to keep in mind that when we ask people how they prefer to consume online news. Most people still say they prefer to read it. So it's still 55% that say they prefer to read online news as opposed to watch it or listen to it. But nonetheless, over time, that is shifting, and what we've seen is the preference for consuming news via video growing. And it's got to the point now where in some markets, for example, Indonesia and Mexico, the preference for watching is actually stronger than the preference for reading. So this is definitely something that is changing, even in other markets with a strong reading preference, we can see that shift. And of course,  we're talking about all sorts of different formats, so whether it's podcasts, short form video, long form video, these are all things that we track, and they're all things that seem to be growing. And when we ask audiences, what they like about video, some of it comes down to the fact that it's sort of similar to television. There's a kind of connection that people feel with the presenters or the hosts. Some people find it more convenient. But what's different, I think, about video consumption now, is because so much of it takes place on platforms, there's also the idea that it's associated with more diverse perspectives, and I think that's what some people are looking for from video.

Mitali: What does it mean as a takeaway for mainstream media though, Richard both in terms of sort of a challenge and opportunity perspective, where they do have large personalities, and I mean large in terms of their following and their reach, who are part of mainstream media organisations, but have strong presence across some of these networks.

Richard: I think it is difficult for publishers. I think the reality is that most video consumption does take place on platforms, at least according to our data, and that means that all the traditional sort of challenges you might expect to be associated with news consumption on platforms kind of still apply. It's hard to monetise. You're kind of vulnerable to algorithm changes, to changes in the platform, and you don't necessarily have as much control as you would like if you're a publisher, so you have to ask, where does the power really lie? I think that in addition to those challenges, there are also unique challenges around video networks, just because, I think in some senses, news isn't a great fit. People come to video networks often because they want to be entertained. They want to relax. The sort of tone is different. Audience is younger. So how does news fit in there? How does it sort of appeal to that audience? And I think that's one of the key challenges around video for publishers.

The ascent of news podcasts ↑

Mitali: Nic It's such a terrible line to use, but where are we on the ‘Video killed the radio star’ argument. Podcasts have really been a thing, and you've been tracking this over the last couple of Digital News Reports. As I said earlier though, they're kind of mixing over into video, but they're also a space where we see really strong audience loyalty and connection with the podcast that they're listening to, and maybe even a small segment there that are willing to pay to engage with these podcasts. What did you find in that?

Nic: Yeah, as you say, it's just getting increasingly harder to find these terms. You know, what is a podcast these days? But I think they do have this characteristic of habit and loyalty and connection, which, of course, radio had as well. And I think they're in this sort of transition. Some of them don't quite know whether they’re video, whether they're audio, whether they're video, whether they're audio, whether they're going for the intimacy or whether they're going for the mass reach. In the survey this year, what we tried to do was to focus specifically on news podcasts. There's obviously lots and lots of podcasts. There's this sort of mixing of news and entertainment, but we are specifically looking around news and current affairs and politics. And what we find, on average, is it’s a relatively small audience. So it's around one in 10, on average across countries, and that's less than traditional radio, just to put it in perspective, in most countries, but in some countries, like the United States, we see for the first time, because we've asked these questions in the same way, that podcasts are actually more popular, getting more weekly reach than the radio, and I think that's a really significant change. And it is about this intimacy. It's about this connection. It's about being able to access it when and where people want it. So in the United States, 15% say they access news podcasts in the last week that includes audio-first podcasts like The Daily, like Up First from NPR, these traditional podcasts have been around for ages, and then the competition has come from these sort of video-based, commentary, opinion-based podcasts, which can come from anywhere from creators, also from traditional media. And that's really where we're seeing most of the growth. And some of that is partisan. Some of it is difficult. You know, our audience survey suggests that when it comes to misinformation, disinformation, many people actually think that creators and influencers, partly through podcasts, partly through through video is as big a threat actually, as politicians and other forms of misinformation. And

Mitali: And it might be interesting also to contrast Nic what you're seeing in terms of what we've talked about the US and trends we're seeing there, and that much of this is echoed in parts of the global majority. But the fact that this podcast relationship is a bit different with the Nordic countries, isn't it, where it's more sort of natively held, and that is an audience that does tend to consume news through podcasts. What do we see there?

Nic: Yeah, absolutely. So the US, as I say, the growth has come from sort of non-traditional media, if you like, but in countries like Norway, what we see where we did qualitative work this year, then it's really a few small publishers who own the podcast market. So that's obviously the public broadcaster. They've really heavily invested in it. But also some of the big publishers, like Schibsted, absolutely the top of the market, and there's just less space for creators in the smaller countries, so that, you know, smaller audiences, there’s less incentive, if you like. So I think we're definitely seeing podcasts developing in different ways, but some of these underlying trends around video are happening everywhere.

Attitudes to AI and news ↑

Mitali: One thing that's not an underlying trend, Richard is AI and news something as well that we've been tracking for a couple of years now, but it really felt like through ‘24 and ‘25 that became quite front and centre for newsrooms, both in terms of internal processes and external engagement with audiences. What did we find there? Because it's a bit of a mixed picture, isn't it, in terms of audience attitudes.

Richard: Yeah. I mean, in the survey, we're focusing on audiences rather than publishers. And I think in general, the background is that there's lots of evidence now that the sort of take up of generative AI has been, has been really, really rapid over the last three years. So just in general, people are using it for all sorts of things, often for, you know, getting information, not just creating media, which I think is what generative AI is supposed to do, create text, create images, etc. It's clear now that people are also using it to get information, which perhaps was an unintended use of generative AI, but nonetheless, it seems to be happening. That being said, I think this kind of use for AI, of AI for news, at least in our data is pretty nascent, so we're talking about 5% of people or less who say that they have done it in the last week. And I think there's also a follow up question about, what are people actually using it for? They could be asking it for a summary of the latest headlines. They could be asking for more depth on a topic. They could be fact checking. They could be doing all sorts of things around news. But because generative AI is so flexible in that way, there's lots of different ways that people could be using it. And I think that's something we're not quite sort of sure about yet, and it's something we want to dig into a bit more.

Mitali: Yeah, could you scratch that point a bit more, though, in terms of the differences we're seeing across generations in terms of just experimenting with AI for news, Richard, because it's a bit different with younger audiences, where we found a larger percentage willing to sort of experiment with AI and news

Richard: Yeah, that's right. Like a lot of things that people do online, they tend to be kind of more widely used, or more commonly done amongst the younger age groups. And that's something we've definitely seen. And I think also one of the other things that is quite clear is that people, if they've used AI, or if they have a certain attitude towards technology, more broadly, they're more likely to experiment with using it for news, for example. So there's all sorts of other factors that are kind of external from news that are shaping people's use of the technology.

Mitali: What about the more sticky questions, if you will, around sort comfort with news that is generated by AI, or willingness to sort of consume news that has been produced by AI, or indeed, what they feel about AI news itself?

Richard: Yeah, in the survey we also try to ask people about how they feel about the use of AI within news organisations, the other side of the coin. And I think it really depends on what people have in mind when they think about journalists using it. I think in general, people seem to be quite skeptical about the idea of AI being in the driving seat and the human just sort of coming in at the last minute and sort of making a few tweaks. That's something that the public seem to be fairly skeptical about when it comes to the idea that something can be mainly made by journalists, but with a bit of help from AI, perhaps using it for research, checking, spelling and grammar, these kind of things. That's something that the public are relatively comfortable with. I wouldn't say that they're sort of completely enthusiastic, but nonetheless, more comfortable than the kind of alternative scenario that I mentioned. 

Looking beyond that, it does also depend on the topic. People are less comfortable with the idea of AI being used on hard news topics, which I think is not surprising. And it also sort of depends on the nature of the task as well. People are comfortable with what we might think of as back end tasks. So checking grammar, checking spelling, doing research, you know, kind of making suggestions. Less comfortable with the idea that AI should be actually creating the content itself, and that's something that audiences seem to have a kind of distinction around also, I think, as I mentioned, it does depend to a certain extent on whether people have used the technology before or not. And that's, again, that's not really surprising. People who are early adopters to a technology tend to be more aware of its limitations. And what we found, not necessarily in this study, but in another study is that the more people have used AI in general, for whatever it may be, the more comfortable they are with the idea of AI being used for journalism.

News avoidance ↑

Mitali: And it is interesting that in this report is the first time you see that data point basically make an entry into the chart. And Nic the other big topic we've been tracking for many years now is news avoidance. It looks like the news there is a bit bleak, and it's also ironic, as you point to in your executive summary, where it felt like a really big year, sort of news wise, the super election year, et cetera, et cetera. But it didn't look like it shifted the needle in terms of news avoidance.

Nic: I mean, those things are probably connected. You know, people are turning away in many ways from the amount of news and the amount of difficult news that they see. And of course, it's not that everyone is avoiding the news. It's that many of us are sort of doing it selectively at particular times of day or for particular stories. And that's probably a perfectly reasonable reaction to news coming at us from all angles, 24 hours a day. Why is this happening? So that's one of the things we looked at this year. You know, it’s partly due to the difficulty of the nature of the news. Obviously, we have ongoing conflicts, very difficult images coming out of Gaza every day. And, you know, a lot of people just find news depressing. They want something more uplifting. Others talk about the fact that there's nothing they can do. They really feel powerless in the face of these intractable global issues. And you know, when it comes to politics that it just causes loads of arguments, you know? So it's better to stay away from the news altogether. So those are just some of the reasons. One of the ones I found particularly interesting is for young people in particular. People in particular, they just find the news hard to understand. You know, sometimes we write the news, journalists write the news for themselves or for other, sort of, elites. And I think that's something that, you know, journalists can actually do something about. Publishers can actually do something about.

Mitali: Yeah, let's talk about that Nic because for the second year running that it is as high as it is, this is similar to what we saw in 2024 as you said, with young people, it's not just overwhelm. It's also a lack of relevance. They don't see how it's relevant to their lives, or that they're reflected in it. And it feels like it's certainly bleak in one sense, but it also sort of points to options to do it differently. For mainstream publishers, what do those options look like?

Nic: Yeah. I mean, I think the first thing to say is that journalists shouldn't be shy from carrying on doing the important stories, you know, politics and global conflicts. People expect that, even if they sometimes turn away from it. But I think beyond that, people really do want more hope, more inspiration. They often want a broader agenda as well. I mean, Richard was talking about that earlier in terms of those different perspectives. Sometimes maybe the news could cover stories in a more constructive way, so difficult stories, but actually looking at how those problems might be solved, rather than always looking at the negative. And publishers are really broadening and thinking very deeply about this, actually. So for example, the Globe and Mail in Canada has set up a number beats based on utility, whether that's health, happiness, fitness, happiness, a lot of lifestyle stuff. So it's not getting out of news. It's combining it with some of these other things that have more utility and relevance, as you say, for other people. And then, of course, AI, we've just been talking about AI, using AI, maybe to help solve the relevance problem as well. So turning text into audio, into video or into ways in which younger people might be able to consume that news in different ways. So I think the news industry is really taking this seriously in terms of thinking about different ways to broaden and not just do the difficult news.

Trust in news ↑

Mitali: Yeah, Richard, let's turn to trust, not declining, but not rising. And I think it may be useful for people that are sort of joining us or listening to us for the first time to walk through what our parameters are while asking that question to audiences and then talk a little bit about the findings this year.

Richard: Yeah. So we in the survey each year, and we've been doing this now since 2015 we ask people whether they trust most news most of the time. So that's our kind of tracker question, and it allows us to see whether levels of trust in the news go up or down over time. I'll come to that in a second, but sort of the kind of the first thing to say is that it really varies a lot depending on where in the world you look. So you can look to a place like Finland, which has very high levels of trust, around two thirds of people say that they trust most news most of the time. And then even within Europe, you can look to countries like Greece and Hungary, where the figure is actually closer to 20% so a really, really large variation in terms of how much people trust the news.

When it comes to the trend, you know what's happened in the last 10 years? So before the pandemic, what we really saw was a steep declines in a lot of countries when it comes to the proportion of people who say they trust the news. Then when the pandemic hit, we saw what we call a sort ‘COVID bump’. And essentially, more people, we're not talking, you know, huge changes, but you know, increases of around five percentage points, more people saying that they now sort of trust the news. And we interpreted that at the time, as a kind of ‘rally around the flag’ effect, which is fairly common in political science, in times of crisis. Since then, after the bump, it's mostly been pretty stable, not in every country, but in certainly in some of the countries we focus on. And that's why we've seen the figure in the last three years stay at around 40% if we average across all the different markets.

Mitali: Yeah. And when we take that a step further in terms of what the news or journalism can do to increase trust, it's interesting that many of the answers that come in from audiences are things that journalism is thinking about, or should.

Richard: Yeah absolutely. I mean if you ask people what would increase your trust? You know, we shouldn't completely look at those responses and take them at face value. I think we have to be a bit careful about that. But nonetheless, I think there is some value in it. So when we do that, people are pretty clear about what they want, in the sense that this doesn't really vary a lot when you look to different parts of the world and different countries. So people tend to say they want more transparency around the news. They want to know more about how it's made. For example, they want high journalistic standards, which isn't surprising. They want fair representation of people like them, which I think is perhaps something that publishers could potentially do a bit more on in some cases, and also, again, unsurprisingly, to be sort of what audiences see as less biased or less partisan. So those, you know, there are kinds of general agreement on those things. And I think that, you know, in that sense, people don't really want news organisations to do anything radically different from what they're doing. They just want them to do it better. They want them to do a better job of what they're already doing

And of course, journalists might come back and say, ‘Well, we're already doing all of that stuff’, you know, but then perhaps there's a problem of communication, you know. What can publishers do to communicate their efforts better to the public in order to increase trust?

And I think it is also worth remembering, as I mentioned when I was talking about the pandemic. You know, trust in news is shaped by all sorts of different things, not just by what publishers and journalists are doing. It's shaped by external events, and one of the things we've picked up on a couple of years ago was the importance of criticism, for example, from politicians of the media. That's not something that journalists can control, but it's still something that seems to shape trust.

Paying for news ↑

Mitali: Yeah, and the fact that one of the key verticals remains original reporting, and I think that's important for news organisations in an environment where they're thinking so much about AI and automation, people still value stories that are shoe leather reporting, if you will. Speaking of bumps, Nic, the one thing that's different as well is the ‘Trump bump’, which, the last time around, kind of lifted the mainstream news organisations or interest in them, we didn't see this time. And more importantly, we're not seeing any movement around subscriptions, which is, I think the bugbear for a lot of news organisations,

Nic: I mean, the headline is pretty similar to last year. So across 20 markets have been selling for some time where publishers are trying to charge for news. The average is about 18% who say they pay for some kind of online news could be subscription, membership, donations, and obviously the vast majority are not paying, in other words, in pretty much all countries. So most people are still happy with what they can get for free, either from publishers who are providing free content or from platforms.

There are exceptions. You know, it is higher in Nordic countries: A number of strong brands, strong publishers, platforms are weaker, and there's much more of a tradition of subscribing to print, which is carried over to digital. So we definitely see a lot of variation in subscription, just like we do in trust. And as we discussed earlier, it's hard to get people to pay for something that people see as depressing, and they're up against a whole range of other calls on their money, subscribing to entertainment which is more fun and interesting, and so that's also a factor.

Mitali: I know you've pointed to examples that have been relatively successful, such as bundling, as you said, or sort of bringing in different titles under one subscription offer, discounting seems to be a bit more sort of, you know, hit and miss. Is there anything else that publishers can explore in order to encourage audiences to pay? And I'm pointing to audiences that are not currently.

Nic: So this year we asked people who weren't currently paying that could, of course, include people who did pay previously. What might persuade them. And you know, it does come down to broadly those two things, price. You know, more flexibility of price, a cheaper price. And of course, there are publishers who are now experimenting with that. The Washington Post, for example, has been experimenting with day passes for a little while, and then this idea of, can you put together different kinds of value. So that could be the sort of thing The New York Times are doing. They're putting together news and lifestyle content, sport, games, cooking into a bundle that provides more value, and that obviously is better for attention, as well as attracting new people. There's other publishers around Europe that are putting together national and international so combining, say, The Wall Street Journal with a big national title, that's another form of bundle. You've got local and national, Bonnier in Sweden is doing a lot of that. So in some parts of the world, they're experimenting with just different ways of creating value. Because ultimately, consumers don't just want to pay for lots of individual news subscriptions to difficult, depressing news. There needs to be some more value in there. And I think we're going to see a lot more over the next few years of this kind of bundling, consolidation of different packages of value.

Turning to news to check information ↑

Mitali: Richard, we've been tracking misinformation and concerns around that for a long time. Again, very high, interestingly, extremely high for markets like the US, as high as Africa this time around. But I think it bears sort of underlining and highlighting the fact that fundamentally, audiences still believe in trusted mainstream news organisations when they're going to confirm something or they're looking for, you know, information that they can rely on. Talk to us a little bit about that?

Richard: Yeah, as you said, we've been we've been tracking various issues around misinformation for years now, but we did something new this year, and we asked people, what would they do or where would they go if they wanted to check something that they saw online that they were dubious about? And I think ‘if’ is a very important word here, because we know that people, understandably, don't always check everything that they see, but if they want to check, where do they go? And what we found was that news sources, particularly news sources that people trust, came at the top of the list of a range of different options that we that we offered people, and even some of the other options, like go to a search engine, when we followed up, they're actually using a search engine to get to a news source. So you know this, this, this sort of shows the importance of reliable news sources when, you know when it really matters. And it's something that we actually hear from, from journalists all the time. You know, when the chips are down, people will, come to us, and then that's something that you know seems to be right at least in our data. And it's not just necessarily in this, in this, you know, when people see something they're unsure about, it's also we found it when, you know, election results come through people go to trusted news sources in times of crisis like COVID, we saw that as well. So it does seem to be the case that people, when it really matters, do go to news.

Mitali: If we were to flip the coin in terms of spaces that they are most concerned about, again, that's interesting, because there's, there's politicians, which is a big jump, but there's also some of this, this creator ecosystem, where many parts of the world are quite, quite suspicious of what's coming out from there.

Richard: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's, it's sort of just in the nature of platforms that it's very varied. I mean, in some cases, we're looking at creators that are really doing, you know, sort of good journalism, you know, useful journalism. And of course, that's one side of it. But on the other side, we have the possibility that, you know, we're talking about creators who aren't, who aren't trying to, trying to do that. And I think that's one of the challenges with platforms for publishers, is how do they position themselves in a world where both of those things can co exist

Cause for optimism ↑

Mitali: Nic, it's 14 years with the DNR, and this is your last one as author for the Digital News Report. Of course, you stay part of the Institute, and we continue to do lots of exciting stuff. But just as someone who's kind of taken this from the start to this point in time, what's the big trends that stand out for you? And what do you think looks like, things to think about for the journalism community?

Nic: I've been doing quite a lot of reflecting this year, not just about this year's data, but about some of those longer term trends. I mean, we've seen amazing stuff. The way in which, over the last decade or more, mobile phones and platforms together have disrupted the news industry, they've increased competition, they've fragmented consumption, they've changed the business models, you know, really fundamentally. And of course, we're just at the beginning of a new phase of disruption around AI. I guess what gives me hope for the future is, you know, I've seen the adaptability of the news industry, you know, it's still here. And to some extent that's, you know, survival instinct. But I think more than that, I'm optimistic, because I think that people, as we were just discussing, you know, are going to need, still going to need accurate, reliable information. And our report this year really reinforces that. That's what people want from the news industry, to focus on some of those principles of accuracy, reliability, shoe leather reporting, some of the things you were talking about there, which feel more important than ever as we go into the AI era, including that human connection. So that gives me optimism.

I think just the other thing that gives me optimism is the way in which we see people doing new journalism is not based on how it was done in the past, but is rooted in something, something digital, fundamentally digital. So that might be a Substack newsletter. You know, amazing, amazing pieces of value. Some of the investigative work that has been done now, done by distributed teams that wouldn't have been possible before, that is really sort of shaping investigations in new ways. Young creators telling stories on TikTok, some of it is just fun, and other stuff is incredibly creative and incredibly valuable and brings something genuinely different to the landscape. So I think there's a lot to embrace, a lot of positives, as well as a lot of challenges, which are all documented in this year’s report.

Mitali: This has been an intense ride. Thank you both. Thanks very much for joining in.

Listen to the whole series