Our podcast: What should we expect from journalism in 2025?

From the rapid evolution in the platform referral model to advances in capability of generative AI, newsrooms are having to deal with a raft of drastic changes in news production and audience behaviour.  In this discussion, two authors of our yearly Trends and Predictions report, based on survey data of over 300 news leaders in 51 countries, break down what's keeping news leaders awake at night, what areas they plan to prioritise this year and what may happen to journalism in 2025. They look at generative AI, reader revenue, news influencers, product innovation and a lot more.

The podcast

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Speakers

Nic Newman is the lead author of the Journalism and Technology Trends and Predictions report and is a Senior Research Associate at the Reuters Institute. He is also a consultant on digital media, working actively with news companies on product, audience, and business strategies for digital transition. He writes an annual report for the Institute on future media and technology trends.

Our host Federica Cherubini is Director of Leadership Development at the Reuters Institute. She is an expert in newsroom operations and organisational change, with more than ten years of experience spanning major publishers, research institutes and editorial networks around the world.

The transcript

Confidence in journalism in 2025 | Concern about search referrals in the age of AI | Relations with AI companies | Navigating the new platform landscape | Revenue sources and product innovation | Coping with the rise of news influencers | The challenge to retain talent | Overcoming news avoidance | Getting the most from AI

Confidence in journalism in 2025 ↑

Federica: One way to summarise the overall mood music, if you want, among the leadership of news publications is to understand their overall level of confidence in journalism, specifically for 2025, and how this has changed over the past few years. It's not a very positive picture they paint is it?

Nic: This is a question we ask every year, and this year, just four in 10, so 41%, said that they are confident about the prospects for journalism, and that's come down from 60% a couple of years ago. So I think, just for context, we also ask people to put open comments for some of the reasons for this, and there's a number of things behind it. So many journalists and news organisations are dealing with increasingly polarized countries, authoritarian regimes that are making it difficult. So attacking the journalists, undermining them in different ways, using legislation to try and hamper independent journalism that scrutinises their record.

And then, you know, beyond that, and we saw this in the US election, you’ve got politicians just deliberately trying to bypass the media, so [for example] Donald Trump talking to podcasts as alternative media. So this sense that journalism is losing influence and losing attention. You mentioned this already, news avoidance. Many news organisations are really struggling to get people to come directly to their websites anymore. And then you combine that with everything that’s happening with AI, the fears about sustainability of the business models, I think that's really what's behind this quite low level of confidence we see this year.

Concern about search referrals in the age of AI ↑

Federica: We are recording this podcast just a few days after Zuckerberg announced that Meta is ending its fact checking program. So imagine, imagine the mood. Now, one thing that I found interesting is that despite these like gloomier contexts and the confidence level in journalism overall, newsrooms or newsroom leaders are still retaining a more decent level of confidence in their own organisations’ prospects because it remains around 56%, often fueled by the belief that, because of the uncertainties, independent journalism will be more important than ever. Now, the challenge will be persuading audiences of this in an increasingly hostile and polarized environment. So that will be probably the challenge for the year ahead.

If we look at this landscape, Nic when you know, in the last Digital News Report we talked about this big platform reset, and basically the end of an era of mass referrals from social platforms like Facebook. And using data from analytics company Chartbeat, we see this collapse of Facebook traffic continuing, but traffic from search, and specifically we look at aggregate Google referrals, remain stable, although we know individual publishers might see something slightly different in their analytics. But newsroom leaders are worried about the potential decline and further decline from referrals, and specifically from search. What is driving this worry?

Nic: I think this is going to be the big story of the year, really: what happens to search, and primarily to Google as that disruption gathers pace because of AI. And it's really about the transformation of search engines into answer engines and instead of returning 10 blue links they're going to return the answer in a format that can be digested within the page, so you don't have to then go off to a publisher website or somewhere else to get the detail. And obviously we've seen that starting already, and we haven't seen a lot of impact on referrals to news publishers so far. But if, as we expect, AI overviews get extended - we're seeing a number of other AI companies launching similar functionalities. So ChatGPT has introduced a search functionality, Perplexity, this is really a better way to search - I mean, from a consumer's point of view, this really makes a lot of sense, because it's bringing you back, it's saving you time. It's aggregating this information in a really, really accessible way. And then beyond that, we're seeing the same generative technologies being used to create, if you like, replacements for the media itself. If you look at Perplexity’s Discover page, it actually looks like a normal website. It's got different sections to it, and it's generating that content automatically from everything that's in its databases and by the web searches. Grok Stories, now available for free through Twitter. ChatGPT is going to be doing the same. There’s an app called Particle, which has just come out of beta. And all of this is further weakening the position of publishers compared with platforms, and leading to this existential fear that it's not just another way to access, it's actually a replacement for the media itself.

Relations with AI companies ↑

Federica: Of course, another story from last year is that some publishers made deals with some of these AI companies that you mentioned. Is the nature of these deals reassuring publishers or causing more uncertainty?

Nic: I think it depends what kind of publisher you are. So what we've seen so far anyway is really big companies like News Corp, for example, a deal of maybe $250 million over five years, so really substantial amounts of money, other publishers, probably a little bit less. So some of the AI companies have been doing deals with news agencies or with one big publisher in each country. But the fear, certainly from our survey, is that that's not going to benefit most publishers and a lot of other publishers will be left out in the cold. And actually, the vast majority of publishers we talk to really want some more collective arrangement where it's just much fairer and you don't get these inequalities. So for example, there was a publisher in Brazil who says that the deals done so far have been with international news agencies. And so, you know, whatever money there is, nothing's going to local publishers. And if the traffic is not coming to websites, then actually replacement income, or some way of recompensing publishers is becoming increasingly pressing.

And I think, again, it's very, very hard to predict this, there's so many moving parts, but some of the things that we're seeing, you know, just publishers and platforms edging around, what the value equation is going to be. You've got, in some countries like Australia, you've got new legislation designed not just for the old social media companies, but for this new world of AI. And you've got intermediaries like Prorata, TollBit and others who are trying to broker something that feels a bit fairer, and trying to work out what the value of an AI query is coming back. So I think there's a lot to watch in this space, not to mention court cases, which are rumbling on between the New York Times, OpenAI and others.

Federica: Of course, and we'll see if the first season of the deals is over, or if we're going to see, actually… There were two more deals announced just yesterday so maybe it's not over. But again, who will benefit from it, and how will price [be decided]? Of course, there is not much transparency information around.

Nic: Very little transparency. And, you know, I think there's gonna be a lot of edging around, because this is so new, we don't really know where the value is yet.

Federica: I love one of the leaders in the survey, commented, ‘We are in a marriage of convenience with the platforms,’, and so I’m always kind of seeing which ways the wind blows.

Nic: Yeah, none of this is new, of course, a lot of this is just repeating, but in a different format. I think what's different about this, actually, Federica, is that there is a bit more interest, I think. The AI foundation models can't really do real time news, and so we're seeing a lot of value in the separate index, if you like, of reliable real time news. And so in that sense, you could argue that there is more coincidence of interest between the big AI platforms, who also want to protect their trust and credibility, and traditional media companies.

Navigating the new platform landscape ↑

Federica: And of course, beyond just the AI platforms and the deals, we also ask in the survey generally about the sentiment about the relationship with big tech companies, and we see a split between the people who think they want to increase the ties or decrease the ties with them, and 36% just want to stay the same. So very much a waiting kind of feeling from publishers to see what works. On the other side of this, of course is the proliferation of even more platforms than before, and consideration from publishers on where to put effort and where to invest. What do we see this year?

Nic: The challenge is, increasingly, how do you get your content distributed? And obviously we've seen Facebook and X delivering far less traffic to publishers. So this is my favorite chart. So if I would encourage you to find one chart this year's report, go and seek this one out. Because essentially it is really showing this change of sentiment, definitely the push into AI platforms. But more than that, the push into video. Video is going to become much more important. It has become much more important. So on a net score, where we ask publishers where are going to put more effort and we take away the number of who are going to put less effort, +52 for YouTube, so that's a lot of extra effort. Tiktok, we've talked to publishers that are putting, you know, more than 10 people into TikTok, or vertical video this year, for example.

Then I think you've got a second tier of things, which is, how do we reach audiences in different ways? How can we use the growth of messaging applications like Telegram or Reddit or WhatsApp channels which are now available to find really alternative sources of referral. Bluesky, of course, because people has been this exodus from from X and at least the journalists are heading to Bluesky, according to our survey (+38) but I think unfortunately, a lot of ordinary people won't be, they're going to stick with X and Facebook, and then this really increasing shift in terms of negative sentiment towards both Meta or Facebook, particularly, and X, because they just don't feel that these platforms are aligned with fact-based journalism, or with quality journalism and reaching and providing value to organisations. So it's this much more fragmented landscape, and I think that the lesson is that publishers really need to be much more strategic about who they're trying to reach and why, and then use the fact there are more platforms to engage people.

Revenue sources and product innovation ↑

Federica: Another area of the report, which you've now been doing for 15 years, and that people always look forward to, is all the area around and business models, reader revenue, product innovation, and the combination of this end of mass referral model and expected further disruption from AI is really forcing publishers to rethink business models. We see the digital subscriptions still growing for many publishers. 45% in the survey say they're growing a bit, while 28% said they're growing a lot. But in many cases, it seems not really to be enough. And we've seen that news leaders seem to be betting on three or four different revenue streams, with the subscription still on top of the priority list, display advertising is still important, but, you know, gradually declining. Then there are events and philanthropy. There was funding from platforms. Who knows now how that will shape out. What was the impact of all of this consideration on the product innovation and the focus on product?

Nic: Yeah, I think, I think, as you say, that the bottom line is that digital is kind of growing for a number of publishers, and particularly upmarket publishers can see a future, but print is declining further and faster than they thought. And so that's why we're going to see a lot more layoffs this year, even in parts of the world where journalism remains pretty strong.

And the big question is, where's the growth going to come from? And just producing a digital news site in text is not really going to be enough. And so publishers are really thinking about product innovation, as you say. We asked the extent to which you know, are you just going to iterate and improve this core product, or are you going to launch new products to drive new audiences and engage new audiences? And 44% said that that's a real priority for them this year, which is a pretty high number, I think. And so what does that mean? It means, for example, launching news products like maybe one aimed at younger people. So 42% said that they're thinking of at least launching a youth product to try and engage younger people. And some are launching international products. So there's an example of a Danish slow news organization moving into Finland, just launched this week. You have audio products. So Die Zeit and others are launching audio products a little bit like the New York Times did last year.

And then part of the aim of that is, can you sell those separately? Can you bundle them together so that there's more value in the package? So people have to think twice, three times, four times when they want to unsubscribe. So part of this is about retention, part of it's about incremental revenue. And part of it is can we find new audiences? And I think you know, however it happens, we definitely need to, or a lot of media companies need to, think about how they can provide more value in total, whether that's consolidation, partnership with other companies, or providing more of these sticky products like games or education, whatever it is.

Coping with the rise of news influencers ↑

Federica: You said that one of the issues that affected a bit of the publisher's mood was, taking the example of the US election, the proliferation even more of different actors in the space of journalists. So not just a traditional, mainstream, institutional media, but new actors, and often influencers, or creators. Sometimes there's a bit of a disparity of tone intended from publishers, but like different actors that have a more direct relationship, in some cases, with or speak a different language from, traditional media that really connects with the audience, it seems. And this is something that we picked up also in the Digital News Report, but also a recent report from the Pew Research Center in the US, found around one in five Americans regularly get news from influencers on social media, even with much of the focus of content on politics. What are some examples of these news influencers, and why do you think they work?

Nic: I think first this is very much an emerging space. It's very hard to define influencers. As you say, it covers a multitude of things. You've got, on the one hand, partisan politics, a lot of opinion and commentary. Then you've got a really big growth, I think, partly driven by YouTube and podcasts as well, of infotainment and making connections through audio and video. Then there's young creators, so people who essentially have grown up with these platforms and find it the most natural way to engage with other young people, for example. And we uncovered some very specific names in the Digital News Report, which we wrote a chapter about. So these are people who want to be journalists, and there's journalists who are journalists who now decide they don't want to be journalists, they want to be YouTubers because they think there's more money in it. So people like Taylor Lorenz, for example, recently left the Washington Post because she wanted more control, essentially, and she sees better prospects in building a business through some of these platforms, and it's hard to know what the commonality is. But I think one commonality is ‘we are not mainstream media. We are not fusty, traditional,’ you know, they don't want to be associated with this dying set of news brands. They want to be leaning into digital media which feels more vibrant, more alert. Definitely the sense of authenticity, really, I think, is one of the things that that really comes through.

And in our survey, we actually asked people whether this was good or bad for journalism, this move to creativity and to influencers and creators, and people were a bit split. I mean, they could see that creators are connecting in a different way, and there's probably a lot we can learn from the way in which they really focus on two-way communication, for example, authentic trust, but they're also worried that, you know, this growth of infotainment will squeeze out evidence-based journalism and make it even more confusing for people when they're looking for reliable information. So I think it's a double edged sword. It’s not going anywhere. The drivers are video, and these tools, these powerful platforms that have creation, distribution and monetisation all in one package.

Federica: This might be a good time to mention. We actually also recorded a specific podcast on influencers with the findings from the Digital News Report, and it was published in July. So if anyone is listening, who's really interested about influencers, they can also go and listen to episode five of the Digital News Report podcast and learn even more.

The challenge to retain talent ↑

Nic: I think Federica one of the implications of this advance of the creator economy is what it means for traditional media organisations, actually, and how they retain editorial talent. And maybe you did a lot of talking to publishers as part of this report about this question of editorial talent, but also talent more generally in the organisation.

Federica: So the question around talent, we can split it into two parts that we look specifically for this report. One is the level of confidence that news leaders have in attracting different types of talent across the newsroom. And we've seen it in the past, when we did a Changing Newsrooms report, there is more concern about the ability of attracting data scientists, software engineers, AI competencies, but also product and commercial [staff], whereas there is a bit more of a high level of confidence in attracting editorial staff. But the other side of this coin is even if we only look at the editorial stuff, the split between regular staff, if you want, and some of like the stars that appear. And one of the questions for publishers is, should we encourage our own journalists to kind of develop this personality and tap into this interest that audiences build with specific people editorial talent, and it's not a new issue. Of course there are TV stars and radio anchors that really made their name in the past. So this is not new.

Nic: I suppose, what's different is that the talent knows how much they're worth and how much they could get elsewhere. They have alternatives. So that does mean that things like revenue sharing or different ways of treating talent probably, publishers need to think quite seriously about how to do that.

Federica: Yeah exactly. So like it's the alternative that now the talent has to kind of go out either on their own, right. It's no longer just leaving to go to the competition, which is still happening, like the BBC, for example, in the UK. So some like big names leaving, sometimes just for the competition. But also now the possibility to leave, to go on Substack or their own channels is something that definitely news publishers need to think about how to treat talent in a way that reflects the new landscape.

Overcoming news avoidance ↑

Nic: I mean, another key theme that we looked at in this report is how to engage people with the news, or how newsrooms need to do that around difficult stories like Ukraine, like Gaza, for example. And you know, we talked about this a bit earlier, but we find more people in our research turning away from news or trying to manage the amount of news that they get through. You know, the problem of news overload. There's, of course, no easy answers to this, but what kind of things are publishers looking at this year in terms of ways of addressing news fatigue, news avoidance,

Federica: I think in part, is the creativity around formats. So we heard, for example, from The Guardian, who said that they have a daily explainer with key bullet points about the daily development of the Russia-Ukraine war, and we were told they're consistently popular and with very high reading times, but really specifically thought to serve those audiences who are interested, but not maybe as determined to follow every pace of the development as you would with blogs or live feeds. Another angle around formats is really thinking about whether you are using live blogs or podcasts or social video, really tapping into the human stories and sharing and highlighting the impact of the big events on people's ordinary life. You've mentioned already the new Finnish startup. I hope our Finnish listeners will forgive me for mispronouncing but I think it's Uusi Juttu, so this new startup, which is very much about slow journalism and in-depth feature not too dissimilar from what SVD in Sweden is doing with Compact whose tagline is read less and no more. So really thinking…

Nic: Yeah, there's a lot of startups and news organisations who are trying to deal with that issue of news overload and confusion that I think a lot of people have. So I think we’ll spot more of that this year, or expect to see more of that this year.

Getting the most from AI ↑

Federica: Yeah, last but not least, the big topic of the report, of course, talks about generative AI and newsroom transformation. It’s been two years that ChatGPT has been released more to the public and then more like democratisation of access to some of these tools. We see from a newsroom perspective that last year, you predicted that principles and guidelines were going to be created, new roles as AI specialists were going to be created. Indeed, we see them in place this year. What are some of the most important uses of AI you've picked up this year?

Nic: The main focus for a lot of newsrooms has been to understand the technology and the possibilities and to really focus on these backend automation of workflows to make things more efficient. That might be, you know, automated transcription, translation, research, people are experimenting with summarizing articles and putting at it the top of web pages, maybe optimizing your content and metadata using AI.

And what we broadly see as these toolkits. AI toolkits now exist in most newsrooms, and people are gradually adopting and understanding what this technology can do. I think what's going to be interesting about 2025 is the focus more on things that audiences see, and we were talking earlier about addressing news avoidance through providing more accessible formats, like turning text into audio. So in our survey, 75% of the publishers said they were considering basically creating an audio version of every single story, which is increasingly easy to do through AI, or putting these little summaries at the top of articles would be another one. But even turning text into videos so that you can give people a choice. You can take a text story and turn it into, say, a vertical, an Instagram reel or a TikTok. And I think this kind of content transformation, we're going to see a lot more of as well as things like chatbots. I think the question is, what does that look like, and how do you make sense of that within a user interface? And I think we will just see more of these little toolbars at the top that say, you know, summarise the story, talk to the story, chat to the story. There's a whole load of different ways in which these AI capabilities are going to be shown to audiences, and I think we're going to see a lot more of that this year.

Federica: Another AI powered development on the horizon is intelligent agents. Who are they? What are they?

Nic: Well we talk a lot about what newsrooms are doing, but fundamentally the thing that's going to change consumer behaviour is what the big platforms are doing. And obviously that continues to move at an incredibly fast pace. And I think what we'll see this year is that AI… You know, previously, you've had to go to ChatGPT, and that's obviously going to a particular place to use AI. Increasingly, it's going to be built into the operating systems. It's going to be native to the operating systems. And that's what's really going to unlock this for most ordinary people. So things like Apple intelligence, which is part of Apple's new iPhones, and within that, how you have these intelligent assistants or agents. So there's this horrible word ‘agentic’, we're going to hear a lot more about, which is basically this idea that the AI agents are acting on your behalf. You know, they can book tickets for you, they understand what's going on in your diary, but in a news context, they could assemble, you know, personalized newspapers for you, really understand what you like, what you don't like. So it's back to algorithms. It's back to ‘Is this good or is this bad?’ But I think that's going to be a, you know, really interesting development.

And then aligned to that is this move to conversational interfaces, so you won't just have to type in your questions. You can literally ask it. And again, that takes away a lot of the friction. So many of the platforms have introduced really good conversational ways of accessing information. So it comes back, not in a robotic voice, but in one that really sounds like a human and recognizes your voice and intonation and responds to it in much more natural ways, and without the latency we've had in the past. So a lot of the barriers… we thought this was going to happen when, you know, Alexa came along, and the technology didn't really work, but now it's going to in a much more intuitive way. And I think this is going to be very significant in the long term. It’s probably, you know, a bit of a slow burn, rather than the complete transformation this year. But I think those external factors, like what's going on with the operating system, how the browsers become AI enabled this year, I think that's really going to educate people and have a bigger impact on distribution and on the news industry than we think.

Federica: So while our listeners wait for the 2026 report, having a conversation with an AI agent about the report for this year is me and you. My prediction for next year is that we will probably video record this podcast to ride the wave of YouTube, although we might not be able to sell out the O2 Arena in London like the Rest is Politics, the podcast from Goalhanger, did, but you never know.

Nic: You never know. Yeah, we can have a virtual audience of people maybe next year instead.

Federica: What do you think, Nic in closing, that people should really take away from so many of the things that are still developing, still uncertain? Do you feel the pace of change has quickened?

Nic: I mean, I've been doing this for more than a decade, and I what I see is these phases. So it's not like everything's just quickening. You have these stages where things come together, where you have this big change, and then that change takes a while to unravel in ways that we're not quite sure of. So for example, you know, the arrival of the web browser and the launch of Google in the early days of the Internet, before the millennium, that was a really critical moment when the web started to get organised. Then you had Facebook and the iPhone, so social media and the mobile, essentially ,in around 2007, 2008 that led to democratisation of media and another big aha moment. But again, a lot of those, the implications of that, have taken a long time to map out, and now we've got this aha moment with ChatGPT, and the changes are still really at a very early stage. So this is not going to somehow replace journalism as the previous ones didn't, but it is going to change it, and I think the key is to understand that change early on and try and get ahead of it, because it's a really, really significant one. 

Federica: Thank you so much Nic for joining us today on the podcast.

Nic: Pleasure!