What we learned from Reuters Institute’s 2025 trends report – four insights (and three tidbits) that stand out

A good January tradition – the Reuters Institute’s (RISJ) annual “Journalism and technology trends and predictions” report by Nic Newman and Federica Cherubini came out last week.

Based on a survey of 300+ news executives from 50+ countries, the study looks at what’s in store for the news industry this year – political headwinds, uneasy relationship with tech platforms, managing talent, getting on top of the generative AI boom, and more.

The full 40-page report is worth an hour or two of your time. Still, I read the study and gathered a subjective list of four most interesting / fresh findings. Plus, three smaller but noteworthy tidbits that caught my attention.

Insight 1 – publishers are extremely worried about AI causing search traffic to fall, although it hasn’t actually decreased yet

Since the start of the generative AI boom two years ago, publishers have been worried about AI services diminishing news websites’ search traffic.

To be clear, this hasn’t happened yet. As the RISJ study notes, “data… from analytics provider Chartbeat shows that aggregate traffic to hundreds of news sites from Google search remains stable for now”.

Still, 74% of media leaders surveyed by RISJ are worried about a decline in search traffic in 2025. Whether or not we can predict the exact timeline, they are probably right about the overall trend.

Insight 2 – BlueSky is the winner among *new* beneficiaries of X/Twitter disinvestment 

Publishers have understandably given up on X and Facebook, the RISJ report confirms.

Among the upstarts, BlueSky seems to have won the race to replace Twitter for publishers. News leaders will put less resources into Threads, and the word “Mastodon” doesn’t even appear in their responses.

However, BlueSky plays a small role in the social media landscape more broadly. Publishers plan to invest a lot more in video platforms – YouTube, TikTok, Instagram – as well as in LinkedIn and WhatsApp. (And remember that we’re talking about news publishers’ perspective, not necessarily where the mass audience spends their time).

Insight 3 – newsroom leaders have high hopes for non-news products like games & education

We’ve written a lot about publishers investing in non-news products to increase revenue and tackle news avoidance.

The RISJ report shows that 29% of news leaders plan to launch, or are thinking about launching, a games product. Education comes second with 26%. (Though it would be interesting to see a more detailed distribution between “plan to launch” and “thinking about launching”, something the report doesn’t offer). 

Do audiences actually need so many games from news publishers? I guess we’ll learn soon.

Insight 4 – audience-facing AI features are becoming commonplace, but publishers are competing with external platforms

Most publishers are already using AI for backend automation tasks like transcription or copyediting. Now audience-facing features are also becoming more widespread. 

As the RISJ’s survey shows, the most popular initiatives planned are text-to-audio or audio-to-text conversions (75% news leaders will be actively exploring them in 2025), followed by summarisation (70%) and translation (65%). 

The catch is that publishers are not the only ones offering these options. “As fast as the media develop their own tools, the big tech companies are adding compelling new features of their own”, the authors write. AI-based translation is already something most web browsers offer, and products for AI voiceovers and summarisations will become increasingly embedded in existing mass-market products soon. 

Bonus – three tidbits that caught our attention

More publishers are confident in their own business than in the state of journalism in general. 56% of the survey’s respondents are confident in their company’s business, as opposed to 41% who are confident “about the future of journalism”. The authors hint that this might be because the respondents skew towards representing “richer subscription-based publishers in Northern Europe or the United States”. But I suppose some negativity bias is at play as well.

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How can news leaders ensure retention of tech / product employees while competing for talent with (richer) non-media companies? One of the solutions, as suggested by the RISJ report – “editorial-tech hybrid newsroom roles”. “Senior editors such as Jane Barrett at Reuters and Sannuta Raghu at Scroll in India are becoming well-known voices in the AI space using editorial creativity and cultural editorial capital to understand how best to leverage AI for journalistic purposes”, the authors write.

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Four trending terms to add to your dictionary:

• “AI slop” – low quality AI-generated media;
• “agentic” – related to AI agents that “exercise control by anticipating our needs”;
• “brain rot” – “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state” because of consuming low-quality online material;
• “influencer” – a person who can wield influence by creating content on social media, often a derogatory term among journalists.

Source of the cover photo: Kanhaiya Sharma via Unsplash

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