News organisations should be braced for multiple challenges in 2025 that will likely include further attacks from hostile politicians, continued economic headwinds, and battles to protect intellectual property in the face of rapacious AI-driven platforms, a new report has suggested.
The findings and predictions, published today, are set out in an annual report on industry trends by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Authored by Nic Newman and Federica Cherubini, the report also said that changes to search, in particular, will become a major grievance for a news industry that has already lost social traffic and fears a further decline in visibility as AI interfaces start to generate ‘story like’ answers to news queries. The findings from the industry survey were drawn from a strategic sample of 326 digital leaders from 51 countries and territories.
Other findings include:
- Just four in ten (41%) of the survey’s sample of editors, CEOs, and digital executives say they are confident about the prospects for journalism in the year ahead, with one in six (17%) expressing low confidence. Stated concerns relate to political polarisation, a rise in attacks on the press, and media capture – all of which in combination are seen as significant threats to journalism’s ability to operate freely.
- More positively, just over half (56%) say they are confident about their own business prospects, 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.
- Meanwhile, around three-quarters (74%) of survey respondents say they are worried about a potential decline in referral traffic from search engines this year. Data sourced for this report from analytics provider Chartbeat shows that aggregate traffic to hundreds of news sites from Google search remains stable for now but publishers fear the extension of AI-generated summaries to important news stories. This comes after big falls in referral traffic to news sites from Facebook (67%) and Twitter (50%) over the last two years.
- In response to these trends, publishers will be putting more effort this year into building relationships with AI platforms (+56 net score) such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, both of which have been courting high-quality content in return for citations and/or money. With consumer attention switching to video, more publisher effort is also being planned for YouTube (+52) and TikTok (+48) – despite a possible ban in the United States early in 2025 – as well as Instagram (+43).
Read the report in full here.
