2024, the year media contends with AI disruption: Reuters report 

The report highlights the challenges and trends in media for 2024, including the rise of AI and declining social media referrals.

With Search Generative Experiences (SGE) set to take off and the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots that could offer faster and more intuitive access to information, 2024 could be a challenging year of news organisations, says a new report on media trends released by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) at the University of Oxford. 

Titled ‘Journalism, Media and Technology Trends and Predictions 2024’, the report, authored by Nic Newman, Senior Research associate at RISJ, is based on a survey of over 300 editors, CEOs and digital executives from 56 countries and territories, who were asked about the major trends and challenges they expected to face in 2024. While nearly half (47%) of them were “confident about the prospects for journalism in the year ahead”, 12% expressed low confidence. 

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Their major concerns were rising costs, declining advertising revenue, and slowing subscription growth, along with increasing legal and physical harassment in a highly polarised environment. Reasons for optimism included hope that elections in several major democracies and sporting events such as the Olympics would boost consumption and engagement. 

For two-thirds (63%), a critical concern was the sharp decline in referrals from social media sites. As per data cited in the report, traffic to news sites from Facebook fell 48% in 2023, with traffic declining by 27% from X and 10% from Instagram. On Twitter, “the removal of headlines from publisher posts — making it harder to distinguish them from other content sources — has sharply diminished its value as a source of intelligence and traffic,” the report noted. “Both Facebook and X/Twitter as a place for traffic — or even news consumption — are pretty much dead for news organisations in India,” said an editor cited in the survey.

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With declining social media referrals making the job of audience engagement teams “more demanding than ever”, publishers believed the best way to “engage next-generation audiences” was to “up their game in short-form video” and drive more referrals from WhatsApp, LinkedIn and “relatively new sources of traffic such as Google Discover. About 77% of publishers said they would build “direct links with consumers via websites, apps, newsletters, and podcasts — channels over which they have more control.” A key alternative publishers were looking to focus on was WhatsApp’s broadcast channel functionality, with outlets such as the New York Times and Daily Mail having already amassed millions of followers by launching several channels.