Journalism will face unprecedented challenges in 2025, as the intersection of artificial intelligence, content creation and business models reaches a critical juncture. As Google and Meta continue to move away from news while introducing new generative search and chatbots, the limited revenue and access to audiences that publishers have been able to gain through referral traffic is set to decline further. , which means that adaptation is not optional – it is existential. .
The Great Content Divide
THE assessment and protecting journalistic content in an era of aggressive AI-driven content extraction takes place against a backdrop of increasing integration of AI into the newsroom and operations. After a burst of partnerships and licensing agreements With the most prestigious and content-rich news brands over the past year, major tech companies Google, Meta, Microsoft and (Microsoft-backed OpenAI) are unlikely to continue as many over the past year. of the coming year that they continue to claim fair use for text and data mining in the middle of a a multitude of trials this will take years to resolve. This strategic co-opting of publishers with the largest and highest quality portfolios – who also happen to be those with the resources to pursue lawsuits – will create a stark divide in the media ecosystem, where only the largest publishers with guaranteed content pipelines will secure AI partnerships. with big tech companies and AI unicorns. This will leave a long tail of smaller, regional, local, ethnic, investigative and specialty media outlets that will struggle to adapt to an environment in which referral traffic from search and social media continues to decline. quickly amid growing competition from AI-generated content farms and AI-curated news apps.
However, there is also an opportunity for newsrooms excluded from the agreements – the “long tail” of journalism. AI companies will need to solve the problem of declining access to quality data — a trend that is likely to grow as publishers limit unfettered crawling of their websites by AI bots and experiment with new ways to license and monetize their archive and time content real. There are also a growing number of AI startups that cater to consumers or aim to provide business-focused services that rely on access to relevant, timely and trusted content and cannot afford to flout the copyright or offer compensation to their customers, as big tech companies do.
From RAG to riches? The challenge of promoting content
Publishers are entering this complex new terrain of content promotion with limited information about how to establish the value of their journalism in this new ecosystem driven by AI. This means that 2025 will be the year of learning and experimenting. Editors will learn how to distinguish between training and inference data, and why retrieval augmentation generation (RAG), a process that retrieves relevant information from external sources to complete large language models , could offer more diversified and lucrative sources of income than the sale of their archives. to train large language models. They will need to experiment with a range of licensing solutions aimed at connecting content industries to AI models. The news industry will be forced to develop nuanced pricing models for different content use cases, with particular attention to archival content, original journalism and local reporting.
This represents a crucial shift from previous passive approaches to content licensing, making it imperative to learn from other industries like music, which has a more nuanced and dynamic approach to licensing that includes rights and remuneration of musicians and composers, not just corporate content owners.
Adaptive Partnerships for the AI Data Market
2025 will see significant experimentation between publishers and AI companies, among those led by former Big Tech information executives like TOLL And IndigenousHuman to others like Prorated, SphereAnd Emerging methods who have fewer ties to the platforms that have eviscerated the business models of digital journalism. This competitive innovation landscape creates unique opportunities for independent publishers and journalists to explore various AI licensing models and see what works for them. With so many competing startups vying to serve this emerging market, publishers – and in some cases journalists who own their own newsletter or website – will have plenty of opportunities to experiment and try out the different services. This means that investing in technical expertise, forming collaborations to learn and perhaps even sharing technical resources, and collective approaches will become increasingly important.
The year 2025 will be defined by the strategic recalibration of journalism in response to the disruptive potential of AI. Success will depend on publishers’ ability to understand the value of their content, develop technical sophistication, and navigate a complex and rapidly evolving technological landscape, while continuing to produce journalism in an increasingly challenging political environment and hostile.