Editor-in-Chief leaders around the world are increasingly confident about the future of their newspapers in 2025, but still express concern for the entire press industry.
According to the annual survey on trends and forecasts conducted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, only 41% of editors-in-chief, executives and senior leaders surveyed felt optimistic about the prospects of the press industry in 2025, down from 47% last year and 60% in 2022. However, their newspaper's confidence in the future has increased, increasing from 44% in 2023, 48% in 2024 to 56% this year.
Many newspapers expect increased traffic during President Donald Trumps second term, while others have recorded steady growth in online follow-up subscriptions, while others believe that the explosion of unreliable content created by AI will make the public return to mainstream media, the report stated.
The Reuters survey survey involved 326 digital leaders from 51 countries and territories, including 65 editors-in-chief and 63 CEOs or executives.
AI threatens search engines
A major concern in 2025 is the decline in traffic from search services, due to continuous changes in Google's algorithms, the launch of AI Overviews features as well as the development of other search engines and AI conversations.
Up to 74% of the leaders of press agencies surveyed said that their news agencies are concerned that the transitional traffic from search engines will decrease this year. Several units such as reach and Immediate Media have warned of declining Google traffic. However, a report citing data from Chartbeat, which tracks 1,899 news pages, found that traffic from Google across the industry has not decreased significantly.
Remove X and Facebook, switch to video platforms
Chartbeat's analysis also recorded a significant decline in traffic from social media platforms over the past 2 years: Facebook decreased by 67%, X (formerly known as Twitter) decreased by 50% and Instagram decreased by 26%.
Despite these figures, many news agencies still plan to boost Instagram activities this year, with a 43-point gap between the group with the intention to invest more than the group with the discount. Meanwhile, social network X continued to see the strongest decline for the second consecutive year (down 68 points this year, compared to 39 points last year), followed by Facebook (down 42 points compared to 38 points in 2024).
Despite concerns about losing access to search engines, news agencies still plan to increase investment in Google this year, increasing 27 points for Google Discover and 25 points for Google Search.
The survey found that Bluesky, an emerging platform, is attracting media attention. This year, the investment in Bluesky increased by 38 points, while Threads (under Meta) decreased by 22 points, although the number of active users of these two platforms is large (Bluesky 20 million, Threads 275 million as of November 2024). Threads is tending to limit news and political content.
The most obvious investment increase came from cooperation with AI platforms such as OpenAI and Perplexity (up 56 points).
This partly reflects expectations for AI as a new source of revenue: The rate of leaders of press and media agencies who highly appreciate the importance of support from companies that own platforms, including AI, has increased sharply, from 20% last year to 36% this year.
Revenue trend in 2025
Digital revenue is considered the most important source of periodic revenue from readers, including subscriber and membership registrations, with 77% of respondents saying this will play a key role. The next important source of digital revenue is advertising and digital sponsorship (69%, down from 81% in 2020).
The growth rate of digital subscriber registration shows signs of slowing down, but has remained stable over the past 2 years. 73% of units applying the subscriber or member registration model said that the number of paymenters increased in the past year, similar to 2023, but this year the number of people commented to "age increase" at a much higher level than " strong increase".
For units applying the subscription or membership model, the total number of users is still increasing, but many admit that the growth rate has slowed down and cannot compensate for the rapid decline in revenue from print publications, the report stated.
Therefore, in 2025, many news agencies are planning to launch new products, possibly following the "all-inclusive" model of The New York Times, including news, games, cooking, podcast, sports (The Athletic) and product evaluation (Wirecutter).
42% of media outlets are considering launching products aimed at young people next year, 29% consider developing games and 26% consider educational products. However, in general, 55% of respondents focus on consolidating current products, while 44% prioritize the development of new products and services.
AI problem and the future of readers
Public-oriented AI applications that news agencies are actively testing in 2025 include: text-to-odyrics tool (75%), content summarization tool (70%), translation (65%) and chatbot or new search interface (56%), similar to the products that Business Insider, Forbes and Financial Times have launched.
The majority of survey respondents said that their news agency is undergoing significant transformation (63%) or completely (24%) thanks to generative AI.
Almost all (96%) confirmed that automating post-production tasks such as labeling and recording lines will be an important AI application next year, followed by personalizing experiences and proposing content (80%).
