About the paper
The report examines the pressures, priorities, and strategic bets shaping journalism in 2025, with a particular focus on platform disruption, AI, product innovation, and the changing relationship between publishers and audiences.
It is based primarily on original survey research with 326 senior media leaders from 51 countries and territories, fielded online between 20 November and 20 December 2024, and supplemented by background interviews and industry examples. The geographic scope is global, though the report notes that respondents were concentrated in the UK, US, and Europe.
Length: 47 pages
More information / download:
https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/journalism-media-and-technology-trends-and-predictions-2025
Core Insights
1. What does the report identify as the central challenge facing journalism in 2025?
The report argues that journalism is under pressure from several directions at once: hostile politics, economic strain, weakening platform relationships, and the rise of AI-driven intermediaries that may displace publishers in the discovery chain. Its core claim is not that journalism is disappearing, but that institutional journalism is being forced to redefine its value in a far more contested information environment. Publishers face attacks from populist politicians, a growing creator-led alternative media ecosystem, and a technology landscape in which search, social, and conversational interfaces are all shifting against them.
A key tension in the report is the contrast between low confidence in journalism as a sector and higher confidence in individual companies’ prospects. Only 41% of surveyed leaders say they are confident about journalism’s prospects in the year ahead, while 56% are confident about their own company’s business prospects. That gap suggests leaders believe the wider institution is weakening even while some organisations think they can adapt and survive.
The report’s underlying perspective is that journalism’s challenge is no longer just commercial. It is also structural and civic. Publishers are losing control over distribution, are being bypassed by politicians and creators, and may increasingly find their reporting summarised or repackaged by AI systems before audiences ever reach the original source. The report therefore frames 2025 as a year in which journalism must fight for visibility, authority, and economic leverage all at once.
2. How does the report describe the impact of platform change and search disruption on publishers?
The report presents search disruption as one of the most serious emerging threats to news publishers. After major declines in referral traffic from Facebook and X, publishers are now worried that search could be next as AI overviews and conversational search products replace traditional link-based discovery. The report cites Chartbeat data showing Facebook referrals to news sites down 67% over two years and X down 50%, while aggregate Google search traffic had not yet fallen overall at the time of writing. Even so, 74% of respondents say they are worried about possible declines in referral traffic from search engines in 2025.
The concern is not just fewer clicks. It is that AI products increasingly look like replacements for publisher interfaces rather than gateways to them. The report points to ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Particle, Grok Stories, and other automated news interfaces that summarise multiple sources and foreground the platform’s answer over the publisher’s full article. That changes the economics of discovery. A publisher may still be cited, but citations are not equivalent to traffic, habit, subscriptions, or control of the audience relationship.
This leads to a second issue: compensation and bargaining power. The report notes that some major publishers have secured licensing deals with AI companies, but these arrangements are uneven and opaque. Nearly three-quarters of respondents, 72%, say the industry should push for collective agreements rather than company-by-company deals. The report therefore treats AI licensing not as a settled revenue opportunity, but as a contested and potentially unequal new layer in the publisher-platform relationship.
3. What strategic responses are publishers prioritising to adapt their business models?
The report shows publishers leaning harder into reader revenue, product diversification, and direct relationships. Subscription and membership remain the most important revenue focus, cited by 77% of commercial publishers, ahead of display advertising at 69% and native advertising at 59%. But the report also emphasises that most companies are now combining several revenue streams, including events, platform funding, e-commerce, philanthropy, donations, and related businesses.
A major theme is that strengthening the core product is no longer seen as sufficient on its own. While 55% still say strengthening the existing product is the main priority, 44% say developing new products and services will be most important for future growth. Publishers are exploring youth products, audio, video, education, games, food, international editions, and bundled offerings. The report presents this as a strategic shift from a narrow news product to a broader portfolio model, influenced especially by the New York Times example.
The report also suggests that bundling may become more important as a retention strategy. Publishers are looking to combine news with adjacent services and lifestyle products in all-access subscriptions, both to reduce churn and to compete in a crowded subscription market. This reflects a larger assumption in the report: that publishers will need stronger owned-and-operated ecosystems because platform-dependent growth is becoming less reliable.
4. What role does generative AI play in newsroom transformation, according to the report?
The report makes clear that generative AI is no longer a speculative issue for news organisations. It says newsrooms are already being transformed, with 87% of respondents saying GenAI is transforming newsrooms fully or somewhat. The strongest emphasis remains on back-end and workflow uses, such as tagging, transcription, copyediting, recommendation systems, coding support, research assistance, and commercial modelling. These are seen as more mature and less risky than fully automated publishing.
At the same time, the report argues that audience-facing uses of AI are becoming the next frontier. Publishers say they are actively exploring text-to-audio, AI-generated summaries, translation, chatbots, new search interfaces, and text-to-video conversion. The most widely planned initiatives are text into audio at 75%, AI summarisation at 70%, and translation at 65%, with 56% exploring chatbots or new search interfaces. The direction is towards more personalised, reformatted, and conversational news experiences.
But the report is not triumphalist about AI. It repeatedly notes uncertainty about whether these investments will generate savings or sustainable advantage. It also warns that third-party tools may outpace in-house newsroom tools, and that a flood of synthetic content could increase misinformation risks and further weaken the visibility of original journalism. So AI appears in the report both as an efficiency tool and as a destabilising force that publishers must adapt to quickly without assuming it will solve their core business problems.
5. What broader shifts in audience behaviour, talent, and media culture does the report see as shaping journalism’s future?
One of the report’s most important arguments is that journalism is being reshaped by the rise of personalities, creators, and more socially native forms of news consumption. It highlights research showing that many younger audiences increasingly get news from influencers and creators rather than established news brands, and it notes that publishers themselves are split on whether this trend is good or bad for journalism. The report positions this “creator-fication” as both a competitive threat and a creative challenge to legacy media.
This shift has implications inside news organisations too. The report says talent concerns are especially acute in engineering, data science, product, and design. While most respondents are confident about retaining editorial staff and even editorial stars, they are far less confident about attracting and keeping technical talent. That matters because the same organisations that need to innovate most aggressively around AI, product development, and user experience are struggling to recruit the people required to do it.
The report also points to audience fatigue as a major issue. It describes efforts to respond through explainers, more human-centred storytelling, constructive or positive products, and “less noise, more signal” formats. This suggests the future challenge is not just reaching audiences but making journalism feel usable, sustainable, and worth returning to in a saturated and exhausting information environment. In that sense, the report’s broader conclusion is that journalism’s future depends not only on defending its principles, but on redesigning its formats, products, and relationships for a very different media culture.