Journalism Today. 9 Jan 2025

Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

Exploring the future of journalism worldwide through engagement, debate and research. Based at University of Oxford.

Published Jan 9, 2025

By Eduardo Suárez

Today we published Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions 2025, our annual report on what’s next for the news industry in the year ahead. The report is authored by Senior Research Associate Nic Newman and the Institute’s Director of Leadership Development Federica Cherubini, and based on a survey of 326 media leaders from 51 countries. You can read it in full in this link. Here are the key findings:

1. Most publishers worry about a decline in traffic from search

Up to 74% of the media leaders we surveyed say they are worried about a potential decline in referral traffic from search engines in 2025. 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 AI generated summaries might drive audiences away from traditional news sources. Referral traffic to news sites from Facebook (67%) and Twitter (50%) have sharply declined over the last two years.

Only 41% of our sample of media managers say they are confident about the prospects for journalism in the year ahead, amid increased political polarisation and attacks on the press. However, up to 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 growth in online subscriptions or think that the rise of unreliable AI-generated content could bring audiences back to trusted media.

2. Publishers will focus on generative AI

Most of the media managers we surveyed say they will be putting more effort this year into building relationships with AI platforms. The difference between those who said they’ll put more effort and those who said less effort was very large (+56 on this net score). Both ChatGPT and Perplexity have been courting high-quality content from news organisations in return for citations or money.

On the business side, almost four in ten (36%) of our commercial publishers expect licensing income from tech and AI companies to be a significant revenue stream – twice as many as last year. But the amount and structure of any deals remain a point of contention. Up to 72% of our respondents said they would prefer to see collective deals that benefited the whole industry rather than each company negotiating in their self-interest (19%), which is mostly what has been happening so far. A further 6% say they won’t be entering into any deals.

3. Publishers think AI is already transforming newsrooms

Up to 87% of the media leaders we surveyed say that newsrooms are being fully or somewhat transformed by generative AI. News organisations’ use of AI technologies continues to increase across all categories, with back-end automation (60%) considered very important by our respondents, many of whom have rolled out AI toolkits to support new workflows this year.

Audience-facing uses of AI are likely to proliferate in 2025 with publishers leaning into format personalisation as a way of increasing engagement. In our survey the majority said they would be actively exploring features that turn text articles into audio (75%), provide AI summaries at the top of stories (70%), or translate news articles into different languages (65%). Over half (56%) of respondents said they would be looking into AI chatbots and search interfaces. Around one-fifth (20%) think these interfaces will be the ‘next big thing’, with half (51%) expecting more of a ‘slow burn’ impact.

4. Video platforms and Google Discover will be key in 2025

With consumer attention switching to video, publishers say they are planning to put more effort into YouTube (+52 on our net score), TikTok (+48) and Instagram (+43). By contrast, publisher sentiment towards X/Twitter (-68 net score) has worsened this year following the politicisation of the network under Elon Musk. The Guardian, Dagens Nyheter, and La Vanguardia are amongst the big legacy outlets to have stopped posting on X, with Bluesky (+38) a key focus for many.

Google Discover (+27 on our net score) is becoming a more important (if volatile) traffic source and it’s become critical to many news businesses over the last year. Our survey finds publishers realistic about their dependence on platforms overall, with a similar proportion looking to cut ties (31%) as strengthen them (31%). Most of the rest (36%) are planning to maintain ties at existing levels.

5. Many publishers are planning new products to reduce churn

Reader revenue models remain an important revenue source for most of the publishers we surveyed (77%), ahead of both display (69%) and native advertising (59%). Most of the managers we spoke to are now relying on three or four different revenue streams, including events (48%), affiliate revenue (29%), donations (19%), and related businesses (15%).

More than a quarter of our publisher respondents say they are actively thinking about or planning to launch new products around games (29%) or education (26%) with one-fifth (20%) looking to launch an international or foreign language version. These new products are likely to be bundled into ‘all-access’ subscriptions in a bid to reduce churn. At the same time more than four in ten (42%) say they’ll be looking to launch or trial a ‘youth’ product this year.

🔗 Read the report in full on our website | 📄 Download the PDF | 🇪🇸 Lee en español

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