News media trends for 2025: AI threats, Google search decline and subs slowdown

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Newsroom leaders around the world appear to have growing confidence about their own businesses in 2025 but concerns for the wider industry.

The annual trends and predictions survey from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism said four in ten (41%) of its sample of editors, chief executives and other senior leaders expressed confidence for the prospects of journalism in 2025 – down from 47% last year and 60% in 2022.

Despite this, media executives have become more confident about the prospects of their own business – going from 44% in 2023 and 48% last year to 56%.

The report stated: “Many publishers expect traffic boosts amid the expected chaos of a second Trump presidency, others report continuing growth in online subscriptions, while others still think that the rapid growth of unreliable AI-generated content could bring audiences back to trusted media.”

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The Reuters Institute surveyed a sample of 326 digital leaders, including 65 editors-in-chief and 63 CEOs or managing directors, in 51 countries and territories.

News media trends in 2025: AI threat to search

One area of widespread concern for 2025 was falling search traffic amid Google’s continual algorithm changes and AI Overviews launch as well as the growth of other AI chat and search tools.

Three-quarters (74%) said their company was worried about possible declines in referral traffic from search engines this year.

Individual publishers such as Reach and Immediate Media have spoken about or hinted about their Google referrals falling. However, the report cited Chartbeat data from 1,899 news and media websites that showed industry-wide traffic from Google has not yet fallen.

Publishers desert X and Facebook but investing in Bluesky and video platforms

Other platforms have seen a widespread dip in traffic, according to that Chartbeat analysis: across the past two years referrals from Facebook have fallen 67%, while they are down 50% from X (formerly Twitter) and 26% from Instagram.

Despite these numbers, publishers plan to increase their effort on Instagram this year with a 43 percentage point difference between those who say they will put more effort in versus those who plan to put in less. X has seen the biggest drop for the second year in a row (-68 now and -39 last year) followed by Facebook (-42 now and -38 in 2024).

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Although they fear the loss of search traffic, publishers are still planning to increase effort for Google this year (+27 for Google Discover and +25 for Google Search).

[Read more: Google Discover has become Reach’s ‘biggest referrer of traffic’]

The survey also shows Bluesky has won over the media, perhaps more so than the wider public. Bluesky will see more effort put in this year (+38) with less at Meta’s Threads (-22) despite the different size of their userbases: 20 million and 275 million active users respectively as of November. Threads has actively penalised news and political content.

The clearest place that publishers said they would be putting in more effort is in working with AI platforms like OpenAI and Perplexity (+56).

This is partly because AI is being seen as a potential key revenue stream: funding from platforms including AI companies saw the biggest shift in the number describing it as an important revenue stream for the year ahead (up from 20% last year to 36%).

News media revenue trends for 2025

The digital revenue stream described as the most important was recurring reader revenue, whether subscriptions or memberships (77% said this will be important) followed by digital advertising and sponsorship (69%, down from 81% in 2020).

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The rate of digital subscriptions growth has slowed but growth has remained consistent over the past two years. Three-quarters (73%) of those with a subscription or membership model said their number of paying customers had increased in the past year, the same proportion as in 2023 although slightly more said numbers were up “a bit” rather than “a lot” in 2024.

The report said: “Of those publishers that operate subscription or membership models, top-line numbers continue to rise, but privately many tell us that the rate of growth has slowed and that in many cases this is not making up for rapidly declining print revenues.”

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This is why many publishers are planning to launch new products, according to the survey, and are potentially gearing up to emulate the New York Times “all-access” bundle which includes news, games, cooking, audio, The Athletic and product review brand Wirecutter.

Four in ten publishers (42%) said they are considering launching a youth-focused product in the next year while 29% are looking at launching a games product and 26% are considering an education-related product.

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However overall 55% said their focus was on strengthening the existing product versus 44% saying developing new products and services would be more important.

What are newsrooms planning to do with AI in 2025?

The audience-facing AI initiatives being actively explored for 2025 are text to audio tools (75%), summarisation tools (70%), translation (65%) and chatbots and new search interfaces (56%) like those already launched by Business Insider, Forbes and the Financial Times.

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Most of the survey respondents said newsrooms were being transformed somewhat (63%) or fully (24%) by generative AI.

Almost all (96%) said back-end automation such as tagging and transcription would be an important use of AI in 2025, with this followed by using AI to improve personalisation and recommendation (80%).

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