On Message: Media Faces Painful Economics In The AI Age

As long as I can remember, journalism and the media have been in states of flux. It was always thus, in an industry that was dynamic, intensely competitive and latterly, relied upon and was threatened by, rapidly improving technology. Nevertheless, this year’s annual state of the sector report from the Reuters Institute at Oxford Journalism, media, and technology trends and predictions 2026 | Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism provides even more food for thought than usual.

Among the highlights is that publishers expect traffic from search engines to decline by more than 40% over the next three years. Data sourced for the report from analytics provider Chartbeat shows that aggregate traffic to hundreds of news sites from Google search is falling, with publishers that rely on lifestyle content saying they have been particularly affected by the roll out of Google’s AI overviews. This comes after substantial drops in referral traffic to news sites from Facebook (-43%) and X (-46%) over the last three years.

In response publishers say it will be important to focus on more original investigations and on the ground reporting, contextual analysis and explanation, and human stories. By contrast, they plan to scale back service journalism, evergreen content, and general news, which many expect to become commoditised by AI chatbots. At the same time, they think it will be important to invest in more video – including ‘watch tabs’ – more audio formats such as podcasts but a bit less in text output.

Brave words, but investigations are expensive. They take an age, are fraught with legal and sometimes personal risk, and certainly until recently, from a proprietorial viewpoint, there were far more efficient ways, such as interviews and columns, of generating standalone copy. They are also by their very nature, upset people, be they politicians, celebrities or business leaders, who may be advertisers. Media bosses were increasingly less enamoured with the genre – the irony is that they like the kudos of winning awards and acclaim for a hard-hitting exposé but are not so keen on the numbers.

Whether that changes will be fascinating, as will the predicted rise of on-the-spot reports – they are costly too. Like analysis and human stories, they sound good in theory but the reality may prove difficult – not least because cutbacks have seen many experienced journalists, who were expert in supplying cogent assessments and in writing well-crafted news features, lose their jobs.

One trend that may gather pace this year is politicians owning their own media. We’ve seen it writ large with Donald Trump and Narendra Modi reaching millions with their social media feeds. Others are choosing to communicate directly through streaming live press conferences. Next, surely is hosting podcasts or YouTube shows. Gavin Newsom is already doing so with his podcast. Green Party leader Zack Polanski has Bold Politics; Liz Truss has her own YouTube show. But why stop at the politicos? Comms advisers always tell their clients to ‘own the narrative’ – it can only be a matter of time before businesses follow suit. Politicians are doing it because it’s direct, customised for supporters and bypasses the often-awkward gatekeepers: all of which can applies just as easily to any corporate or brand. Many do a results video – but what about their own YouTube channel?

One final note on the phrases and acronyms we will be hearing more of in 2026. One that leapt out is ‘AEO’. Answer Engine Optimisation describes ways in which content providers can get better visibility within AI chatbots and other AI driven interfaces’. SEO is so over; it’s AEO from now on – and the comms game must adapt with it.