AI transforms the news ecosystem as traditional media face new pressure

Traditional media are being reshaped by digital transformation, while artificial intelligence is also transforming the wider information ecosystem, said Felix Simon, a research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, at the International Festival in Perugia in April.

According to the Reuters Institute's Generative AI and News Report 2025, 24 percent of users now turn to AI weekly for information, double last year's figure, with six percent using it specifically for news. The highest use of AI was in the US and Argentina.

The report found 12 percent of respondents were comfortable with purely AI-generated news, rising to 21 percent for content with human oversight.

“I think that the technology sort of enables new actors to take on some of the roles that traditionally were held by news media. And that could be your news influencer who can suddenly use a technology that helps them produce various sorts of authoritative-looking information much more quickly, much more cheaply than before,” Simon said..

However, experts also warned that these opportunities come with significant challenges for traditional news organisations.

David Caswell, Founder of AI consultancy StoryFlow Ltd, said many media organisations were still using AI to make “the existing conception of journalism more efficient,” adding that this would not be enough in the long run.

He said the industry needed bolder experimentation and a strategic rethink because AI was likely to create “a completely new, completely different information ecosystem.”

Natalie Helberger, professor of law and digital technology at the University of Amsterdam, said newsrooms should spend less time asking what they could do with AI and more time deciding where they wanted journalism to go.

She said the starting point should be freedom of expression, describing it as a cornerstone of democracy and of journalism’s role in holding power to account.