The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford recently published a fascinating report entitled “Journalism, media, and technology trends and predictions 2025.” It presents a deep dive into the myriad challenges that media outlets will face this year. In this post, we’ll look at some of the issues they highlighted, including:

• Hostile politicians;
• Changes to search results;
• Generative AI; and
• The increasing prominence of creators as purveyors of factual information.

An increasingly hostile environment for journalists 

‍

‍The report revealed that many publishers feel marked uncertainty about the future of journalism. While 60% of media leaders reported feeling confident about the future of their industry in 2022, that figure had decreased to 41% in 2025. Freedom of the press has increasingly come under attack. More and more countries are passing ‘foreign agent’ laws similar to those already on the books in Russia. Passed in 2022, the Russian law allows a wide variety of individuals and organizations to be classified as ‘foreign agents’ simply because the authorities claim they are somehow under ‘foreign influence.’ According to Human Rights Watch, foreign agents face a number of restrictions, including bans on creating educational material for minors or organizing public assemblies. And Reporters Without Borders has shown that media outlets make up a third of all foreign agents, which has stifled independent journalism in Russia.Even in the US, where freedom of the press is guaranteed by the Constitution, it’s far from smooth sailing. Donald Trump is currently suing the Des Moines Register after they published a poll claiming that Kamala Harris had a 3-point lead over Trump in Iowa. He’s also suing the Pulitzer Center for awarding their namesake prize to the New York Times and the Washington Post for a series of reports on links between the Trump campaign and Russia in 2016. Although they are only civil proceedings, they are still a threat to these organizations since they must spend considerable amounts of money to defend themselves in court. There’s also a real risk that Trump’s incessant verbal attacks on the media could nudge his supporters into acts of violence, such as when a Colorado man allegedly attacked a reporter while claiming “[t]his is Trump’s America now.” Visibility problemsActually getting their content in front of eyeballs is becoming more and more challenging. Platforms such as X and Facebook were once major sources of referral traffic, but that trend is moving in the wrong direction. The Reuters Institute’s report showed a staggering decline, with traffic to news and media properties declining by two-thirds on Facebook and half on X over the last two years. The situation on Google is not as dire, but its decision to prominently feature AI-generated answers at the top of the page presents a different challenge. Although they feature citations that readers can click through to see the information that the AI drew from when coming up with the answer, many in the media are understandably worried about future click-through rates. If the AI appears to have answered their question, many people will simply move on without consulting the sources. 

The challenges and opportunities of AI

Generative AI is one of the biggest challenges facing the established media. Some have tried to contend with it by officially licensing their content to generative AI developers such as when News Corp signed a $250 million licensing deal with OpenAI. But such deals only benefit one particular segment of the media ecosystem. As Rasmus Kleis Nielsen has pointed out, the primary beneficiaries so far have tended to be well-established English-language publications. News Corp, for example, owns such venerable titles as the Wall Street Journal and The Times (London).  There can be other pitfalls with AI. Apple recently had to suspend their AI-generated news alerts after it repeatedly produced inaccurate results, such as when a faulty summary of BBC news headlines resulted in the AI telling readers that Luigi Mangione had shot himself. This was a nightmare scenario for the BBC. Since the alerts didn’t say they were made with AI and prominently featured the BBC’s logo, there was a real risk of their credibility being damaged. It’s not all doom and gloom, however. The Reuters Institute’s report found that AI can be beneficial within the newsroom. Generative AI can aid journalists in a number of ways, including newsgathering and data verification. It can also assist with lower-level content creation tasks such as producing summaries and headlines and basic editorial functions. 

The creatorification of media

It’s telling that two of the most high-profile interviews of the 2024 presidential campaign weren’t conducted by traditional journalists. Rather, they were the work of influential podcasters such as Joe Rogan and Alex Cooper. Both the Republicans and the Democrats invited social media influencers to cover their conventions. Data from the Pew Research Center helps explain this state of affairs, as they found that 21% of Americans say they get their news from influencers on social media (a figure that rises to 37% with people under 30). This fact is made even more remarkable by the fact that the vast majority of these influencers (77% to be precise) have no background in, or connections with, traditional media outlets. The Reuters Institute found that similar trends can be observed across the globe. At the same time, people who do have a formal background in journalism have been tempted to jump ship and rebrand themselves as influencers. It’s not hard to see why when someone like Matthew Yglesias is allegedly making $1 million a year from Substack alone. Another journalist-turned-influencer, ex-Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz, had this to say about her decision to switch gears: “I don’t need [legacy media] for credibility,” she told the New Yorker. “I don’t need it to reach an audience. I don’t know what it does other than connote prestige for a shrinking amount of people. Legacy media sucks, it’s crumbling, and, by the way, I’m going to dance on the grave of a lot of these places.”The freedom that comes from this approach can be a double-edged sword. These creators are free to say whatever they want without having to worry about traditional notions of journalistic decorum, but without institutional support from editors and fact-checkers, the quality of their output can suffer. It’s easy to fall into a ‘publish first, ask questions later’ mindset. According to UNESCO, a whopping 62% of creators don’t verify the accuracy of the material they share with their followers.

A tough landscape is getting even tougher

Over the last decade or so, it has often felt like the media has lurched from one crisis to another, and the Reuters Institute’s report shows that 2025 will present yet more challenges.

• An uptick in official hostility is making it harder for legacy media outlets to do their job.
• Changes to search are affecting the visibility of their content.
• While AI can be beneficial since it can bring in licensing revenue and promote efficiency in the newsroom, the benefits aren’t always shared equally.
• The creatorification of media can emphasize style over substance.

These challenges underscore the need for media organizations to adapt and innovate in order to survive and thrive. While the road ahead may be fraught with obstacles, there are also opportunities for growth and reinvention.