Media innovation is being shaped by two forces at once: rapid changes in technology and persistent uncertainty about sustainable journalism. Recent figures show news organizations experimenting with artificial intelligence, creator-style publishing, video networks, new advertising products, and direct reader revenue while search traffic and confidence in the future remain under pressure.
Contents
- Newsroom confidence and AI employment
- Search, discovery, and platform distribution
- Audience behavior and trust
- Subscriptions and revenue innovation
- Public attitudes toward AI journalism
- How newsrooms are implementing AI
Newsroom confidence and AI employment
The Reuters Institute’s Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions 2025 captured a sharp change in media-leader sentiment. In 2025, 41% of media leaders said they were confident about the future of journalism. That was 19 percentage points lower than in 2022. Meanwhile, 17% said they were not confident, compared with 10% in 2022. These figures describe the views of surveyed media leaders during the 2025 outlook period, rather than a forecast of industry performance.
Artificial intelligence had not yet translated into broad job preservation in the same survey. Some 67% of media leaders said they had not saved any jobs so far through AI efficiencies. A further 16% said AI efficiencies had slightly reduced staff numbers, while 9% said efficiencies had added new roles and costs. The measures distinguish reported workforce effects from broader expectations about AI.
The expected shape of editorial work was changing. A total of 76% of leaders said they would try to get staff to behave more like creators in 2025. The same Reuters Institute report recorded positive intentions around video networks: confidence in investing more was represented by a +52 net score for YouTube, +48 for TikTok, and +43 for Instagram. The figures point to a strategic shift toward personality-led, platform-native production, but they do not measure whether those investments later succeeded.
Search, discovery, and platform distribution
The Reuters Institute’s Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions 2026 reported substantial changes in publisher discovery between November 2024 and November 2025. Google search traffic to publishers was down 33% globally over that period, while Google Discover traffic was down 21%. Publishers expected search traffic to fall another 43% over the following three years. The last figure is an expectation, not an observed decline.
Artificial intelligence was becoming part of the search interface itself. Google AI Overviews appeared at the top of about 10% of search results in the United States, according to the same report. Around one-fifth of respondents expected their company to lose more than 75% of its search traffic. In addition, 62% said media companies simply were not investing enough in future models.
These numbers place distribution innovation alongside business-model risk. A publisher can expand formats and products while still losing visits from a traditional discovery channel. The survey does not establish a single cause for the traffic changes, and its expectations should not be treated as measured future outcomes.
Audience behavior and trust
The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2024 surveyed more than 95,000 people in 47 countries. Its sample represented about half of the world’s population. Because the report combines many markets, country-level results should be read as local measures rather than universal audience behavior.
Trust varied substantially. In Hungary and Greece, 23% of respondents said they trusted most news most of the time, the lowest figures in the sample. News fatigue also increased in Spain: the share saying they felt worn out by the news agenda rose from 26% in 2019 to 44% in 2024.
Social and video services were important routes to news. Across the global sample, 31% used YouTube for news weekly, 21% used WhatsApp, 13% used TikTok, and 10% used Twitter/X. TikTok news use reached 13% across all markets, up 2 percentage points from the prior year, and reached 23% among people aged 18–24. Country results were higher in some markets: 39% of respondents in Thailand and 36% in Kenya used TikTok for news.
| News behavior or measure | Reported share | Scope or period |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly YouTube news use | 31% | Global sample, 2024 report |
| Weekly WhatsApp news use | 21% | Global sample, 2024 report |
| Weekly TikTok news use | 13% | Global sample, 2024 report |
| Weekly Twitter/X news use | 10% | Global sample, 2024 report |
| TikTok news use among ages 18–24 | 23% | Global sample, 2024 report |
| TikTok news use in Thailand | 39% | Thailand, 2024 report |
| TikTok news use in Kenya | 36% | Kenya, 2024 report |
Subscriptions and revenue innovation
Direct payment for online news remained uneven. Across 20 countries, 17% of respondents said they paid for online news, a level unchanged for three years. Country-level shares ranged from 40% in Norway to 22% in the United States, 11% in France, and 8% in the United Kingdom. The Digital News Report 2024 also noted that The New York Times reached 10 million subscribers at the start of 2024.
The Association of Online Publishers’ 2025 digital publishing survey showed publishers prioritizing growth and product change. Growing readership was a priority for 85% of publishers, while 80% prioritized developing new revenue streams through product innovation. Increasing advertising revenues was a priority for 79%.
Publishers also described the approaches behind revenue growth. Increasing revenues from advertisers was cited by 66%, increasing content output by 52%, and changing the nature of content output by 40%. These are survey responses about strategic approaches, so they do not represent the share of revenue produced by each activity.
Advertising innovation was especially connected to direct relationships and branded formats. In an Association of Online Publishers survey on advertising growth, 51% of publishers saw direct deals as having the most potential for advertising revenue growth. The Native Advertising Institute’s Native Advertising & Branded Content Industry Report 2025 reported expected year-over-year growth of 12% for native advertising media companies, with 60% of native advertising revenue coming from repeat clients.
One branded-content commentary attributed $54 billion in ad revenue lost in 2024 alone to ad blocking. That is a reported estimate associated with the commentary, not a result independently established here. In the AOP 2025 survey, 54% of publishers strongly disagreed that they were planning to return to using cookies.
Public attitudes toward AI journalism
The public-attitudes section of the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2024 found that, across 28 markets, 45% of respondents had heard or read a large or moderate amount about AI. Another 40% had heard a small amount, while 9% had heard nothing about it.
Acceptance depended on how much AI was involved and how visible human oversight remained. Some 36% were comfortable using news made by humans with the help of AI. Only 19% were comfortable with news made mostly by AI with human oversight. Among people who had heard more about AI, comfort with mostly AI-produced news reached 26%; among people who had heard less, it was 13%.
The same pattern appeared for human-led production. Among people who had heard more about AI, 45% were comfortable with news produced mostly by a human journalist with some AI help. Among people who had heard less, 30% were comfortable with that model. These results measure reported comfort, not whether respondents could identify AI involvement accurately.
Pew Research Center’s April 2025 report on AI and journalists found that 59% of Americans expected AI to lead to fewer journalist jobs over the next 20 years. Only 5% expected more journalism jobs. On the quality of writing, 41% said AI would do a worse job than journalists at writing a news story, while 19% said it would do a better job.
Even among Americans who expected AI overall to have a positive impact, views about news were divided: 34% said AI would have a positive impact on the news people get, 27% said it would have a negative impact, and 27% said it would have an equally positive and negative impact.
How newsrooms are implementing AI
The Associated Press report AP survey reveals AI’s impact on newsrooms surveyed nearly 300 journalists and newsroom leaders. Seventy percent said their organization had used generative AI in some capacity, and almost half said tasks or workflows had already changed because of generative AI. The survey indicates operational adoption, but it does not mean that every organization used AI in the same way or for publication-ready copy.
The Association of Online Publishers’ 2025 survey adds a governance measure: 46% of publishers said they were developing policies relating to generative AI. Publishers scored AI’s impact on operations and processes at 6.5 out of 10, and its impact on business models and future profitability at 6.1 out of 10. Those scores are perceptions of impact, not financial returns.
Taken together, the figures show a media sector experimenting across production, distribution, audience relationships, and revenue. AI adoption is already widespread in the surveyed newsrooms, yet confidence, trust, traffic expectations, and public comfort remain uneven. The measurable innovation story is therefore not a single technology trend: it is the simultaneous redesign of newsroom work, platform strategy, audience access, and publisher economics.