CCO MAGAZINE

News organisations are braced for multiple challenges in 2025 that will likely include further attacks from hostile politicians, continued economic headwinds, and battles to protect intellectual property in the face of rapacious AI-driven platforms. Changes to search, in particular, will become a major grievance for a news industry that has already lost social traffic and fears a further decline in visibility as AI interfaces start to generate ‘story like’ answers to news queries. The US election also highlighted the growing power of an alternative news ecosystem that includes partisan personalities and creators that often operate outside journalistic norms, and some say have now eclipsed the mainstream media in terms of both influence and trust.

Despite these difficulties many traditional news organisations remain optimistic about the year ahead – if not about journalism itself. Uncertain times tend to be good for business and the prospect of ‘Trump unleashed’¹ could lead to a surge in web traffic and even in subscriptions. But this is by no means guaranteed. One key challenge will be to re-engage audiences that have fallen out of the habit of consuming news over recent years and to find ways of attracting the next generation. Many publishers will be looking to dramatically upscale the quality of their own websites, create more personalised news experiences, and invest further in audio and video. With consumer expectations moving at a rapid pace, embracing change while staying true to core journalistic values will be the key balancing trick for the year ahead.

How media leaders view the year ahead

These are the main findings from our industry survey, drawn from a strategic sample of 326 digital leaders from 51 countries and territories.

• Just four in ten (41%) of our sample of editors, CEOs, and digital executives say they are confident about the prospects for journalism in the year ahead, with one in six (17%) expressing low confidence. Stated concerns relate to political polarisation, a rise in attacks on the press, and media capture – all of which in combination are seen as significant threats to journalism’s ability to operate freely.
• More positively, just over half (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 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.
• Meanwhile, around three-quarters (74%) of our survey respondents say they are worried about a potential decline in referral traffic from search engines this year. 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 the extension of AI-generated summaries to important news stories. This comes after big falls in referral traffic to news sites from Facebook (67%) and Twitter (50%) over the last two years.²
• In response to these trends, publishers will be putting more effort this year into building relationships with AI platforms (+56 net score³) such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, both of which have been courting high-quality content in return for citations and/or money. With consumer attention switching to video, more publisher effort is also being planned for YouTube (+52) and TikTok (+48) – despite a possible ban in the United States early in 2025 – as well as 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 those to have stopped posting on the platform, with Bluesky (+38) a key beneficiary. Google Discover (+27) is becoming a more important – if volatile – traffic source that has become critical to many news businesses over the last year. Our survey finds publishers ambivalent but also 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.
• 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. The majority of our survey respondents (72%) 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. A further 6% say they would rather not enter into any deals.
• More widely, subscription and membership remain the biggest revenue focus (77%) for publishers, ahead of both display (69%) and native advertising (59%). The majority are now relying on three or four different revenue streams, including events (48%), affiliate revenue (29%), donations (19%), and related businesses (15%).
• With subscription growth slowing, new product development is set to be a more important priority in the year ahead. 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. Many of 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.
• Meanwhile news organisations’ use of AI technologies continues to increase across all categories, with back-end automation (60%) considered very important by publisher respondents, many of whom have rolled out AI toolkits to support new workflows this year. The vast majority (87%) say that newsrooms are being fully or somewhat transformed by Gen AI, with just 13% saying not so much or not at all.
• 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. Not all these experiments will make it into full production but the direction of travel is clear.
• More widely, respondents expect to see tech platforms developing and promoting their AI agents this year – many coming with improved conversational interfaces. OpenAI’s ChatGPT now comes with advanced voice features and both Siri and Alexa are getting an upgrade. Around one-fifth (20%) think these interfaces will be the ‘next big thing’, with half (51%) expecting more of a ‘slow burn’ impact.
• Publishers are in two minds about whether the trends towards influencers and creators is good or bad for journalism. Around a quarter (27%) take a negative view, worrying that institutional news reporting could get squeezed out, but others (28%) are more positive, feeling that there is much that news organisations can learn in terms of storytelling creativity and building communities.
• Linked to the above, some publishers worry about losing their editorial stars in a more personality-led ecosystem. But a bigger concern is around attracting and retaining talent in product and design (38%), data-science (52%), and engineering (55%) at a time when new product development is becoming more important than ever.

Words and phrases we could be hearing more of in 2025…