It appears the state of journalism in 2025 is all about, well, one’s perspective.
And while that difference in perspective is not as clear-cut as journalism’s separation of church and state, the split in confidence does ride along similar division lines.
Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism recently released its annual “Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions 2025” report, finding that while 41% of editors, CEOs, and digital execs are “confident about the prospects for journalism in the year ahead,” 17% have low confidence due to various factors considered “significant threats to journalism’s ability to operate freely.”
All that, while more than half are confident about the business of journalism, “a significant jump on last year’s figure.”
“Many publishers expect traffic boosts amid the expected chaos of a second Trump presidency, others report continuing growth in online subscriptions, while others still think that the rapid growth of unreliable AI-generated content could bring audiences back to trusted media,” writes Nic Newman and Federica Cherubini.
Nearly three-quarters (74%) of those surveyed are worried about search-engine referral traffic, with publishers fearing “the extension of AI-generated summaries to important news stories” despite report data that aggregate traffic from Google was remaining stable “for now.”
“In response to these trends, publishers will be putting more effort this year into building relationships with AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, both of which have been courting high-quality content in return for citations and/or money,” the report says, pointing to a 56% point difference between publishers putting in that effort against those saying they’ll be putting in less effort.
(Source: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism)
Interestingly, 36% of commercial publishers expect AI and tech-company licensing monies to be a significant revenue stream this year. For most (77%), subscriptions remain the largest revenue focus, followed by display advertising (69%) and native advertising (59%).
As far as where publishers anticipate AI helping the most, 60% said back-end automation tasks such as tagging, transcribing, and copy-editing would be very important, followed by distribution and recommendations (41%), and content creation “albeit with human oversight” (30%).
“The vast majority (87%) say that newsrooms are being fully or somewhat transformed by Gen AI, with just 13% saying not so much or not at all,” the report says.
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