Bonus blog: The state of online news publishing 2025
... and what this means for you as a reader, or as someone in the industry....
The views and opinions expressed in this post are my own and do not reflect those of my employer or represent our strategy, policies, or views. Any insights shared here are based on my personal experiences and observations within the industry.
Digital news publishing is at a pivotal and absolutely fascinating moment in time - having attended numerous industry events/conferences over the past few months, I have no doubt that 2025 will be a transformative, and revolutionary year for digital news across the industry. Driven by a handful of macro trends, notably the genAI boom, many publishers will enter (and some are already entering) the ‘new era’ of what it means to offer a digital newspaper product in 2025.
In this post, I briefly overview the history of online news and discuss some of the trends shaping the market today, before giving my take on what the major publishers are, or need to be, thinking about.
To both my friends who aren’t in the industry, and my peers who are, I hope this gets you just as excited as I am about the future of news, and encourages you to think about what this might all mean for you!
Ben’s very brief history of online news
TL;DR: Not much has really changed in the last 4 decades!
The first era of online news began in the 1980s when The Colombus Dispatch became the first newspaper in the world that could be read on the web. In 1994, The Telegraph launched the ‘Electronic Telegraph’, shortly followed by NYTimes.com launching in ‘96, and by 2000, it was common for major publishers to have a digital presence. For the most part though, these websites were just publishing digital versions of (a sub-set of) their content, with limited multimedia.
During the early 2000’s, accompanying the dot-com boom, many publishers entered a second era. There was a transformation in the newsrooms, with great expansions of digital production teams starting to publishing content 24/7, no longer constrained by the print ‘cut’ time(s) during the day. Business models changed too, with the first paywalls being (controversially) introduced around this time.
There were also some major product changes to how publishers approached online news: with internet speeds and bandwidth improving, use of multi-media and new formats like blogs became more prevalent - this was a critical juncture, as we began to see articles look markedly different in print vs digital.
However, this era was also accompanied by the rise of the e-paper edition, and by the time the iPad launched in 2010, most publishers had an offering for those who wanted the ‘old school’ print experience in a convenient, digital format.
The third era followed this, driven by the proliferation of smartphones and social media in the early 2010s, and lasting until ~2020.
Digital production was already a core function of newsrooms, and we began to see publishers strategies shift from print-first to digital-first - for example, by 2012 the total number of digital subscribers of the FT surpassed its print subscribers.
Whilst still popular with some demographics, the e-paper became a bit of an afterthought, as this era was really defined by digital-first storytelling (albeit with a shift in many publishers to mobile-first in the 2020s). What accompanied this change was huge increases in production volumes, with papers producing far more content on a daily basis than could ever have previously made it into a paper format, 24/7.
We also saw the rise and fall of ad-driven revenue models, and by the end of this era most publishers shifted towards subscriptions again.
Here’s my (potentially hot) take: although some formats, like liveblogs, interactive tools, and ‘scrollytelling’ became new additions to newsrooms’ arsenals in this third era, I would say that, in the grand scheme of things, there was only an incremental evolution in what news products (physical or digital) were up to this point: a news publisher produced stories, these were curated by a team of editors, who decided which stories went where, when, and all readers got virtually the same experience
Since 2020 we began to see things change though, we entered a brief fourth-era, marked by the rise of personalisation. Publishers realised that they weren’t just competing with each other - they were losing in a competition for digital eyeballs and limited gen-z attention-span (more on these later…) against big tech and the personalised ‘newsfeed’ on social media.
Some publishers were certainly onto this trick earlier, particularly when it came to personalising paywalls/offers to drive subscriptions, or offering features for users to customise their experience. However, only in the last few years have we really seen broader adoption of personalised content recommendations across newspapers, and the emergence of the personalised homepage.
In my opinion, at least, this broader adoption of personalised experiences was really the first major revolution in publishing since the advent of the digital newspaper - suddenly, every reader got something different.
However, adoption of personalisation wasn’t quite as widespread as many outside the industry imagine. There were a few reasons for this, including some of the macro trends I will discuss in the next section, but there are two that stand-out most to me: Firstly, there was hesitancy in newsrooms around personalisation (both about the ethical risks, and fears around people losing their jobs to ‘the AI’!). Secondly, this was new territory for most tech/product teams at ‘legacy’ publishing companies - they didn’t necessarily have the experience, skills, capabilities, infrastructure, or processes to build and deploy these kind of features effectively and efficiently.
This meant that, whilst Product leaders in the industry were making noise about personalisation being the future of news (some of them since the 2010s!), we saw fairly minimal uptake in reality.
However - in January 2023, once 100 million people had started to use ChatGPT only two months after it’s launch, the penny dropped, and I would argue that we entered the nascent stage of the fifth era of news…
Now, before we jump into what this new era is all about, I want to add a bit more context by touching on three of the macro trends that are particularly pertinent to these changing times we’re in…
The trends shaping the market today
TL:DR …
Changing attitudes towards news
Research by Pew, and others over recent years have highlighted major shifts in attitudes towards the news, especially over the last decade. The Reuters Institute Digital News Report in 2024 provides particularly excellent insight into this, as they survey nearly 100k online news consumers across 46 markets:
Firstly, general interest in the news has waned - in the UK, for example, it has dropped by 50% since 2015. Secondly, particularly amongst the younger audience, a staggering trend of active ‘news avoidance’ has emerged - globally, 39% of respondents surveyed stated they sometimes or often avoid the news entirely.
There are many drivers behind this, such as the pandemic, the proliferation of misinformation and ‘fake news’, the perception of growing bias and partisanship in the media, the rise of influencers as news sources, and not to mention the particularly gloomy last few years of the news cycle!
Changing consumption behaviours/expectations
Linked with the changing attitudes towards news have, of course, been changing consumption behaviours and expectations. The new wave of younger consumers, used to social media and products from ‘big tech’ (think Spotify, Netflix etc), have become accustomed to highly personalised and social experiences, and instant, often free access to content, on-demand.
Their preferences for content formats has also shifted: we consume far more media than ever before, but in a fragmented fashion, with updates coming from a multitude of sources. Short, ‘snackable’ content, as well as long-form, in-depth pieces are both popular, but if written content isn’t highly visual, immersive and interactive, it’s probably not going to drive much traffic or engagement nowadays - attention spans are shrinking and content saturation is at an all-time high. Audio and video content is unsurprisingly also booming as a result.
Another major change has been the way we consume - it is now predominantly passive, rather than active - just think about the proportion of content you have consumed today scrolling your feeds vs content you have gone out of your way to visit.
These trends aren’t exclusive to gen-z either; everyone with a smartphone and social media is having their brain sub-consciously reprogrammed towards these new patterns.
The point I am trying to hammer-home again here is that, for a while now, news publishers have not just been competing with other news publishers. Our biggest competition is actually everyone else! The FAANGs of the world, alongside a handful of disruptive consumer tech startups, are so good at ‘experience’ that they are literally changing consumer perceptions and expectations of what digital products and interactions should be.
Incumbent publishers have been slow to adapt, whilst simultaneously hiking-up subscription prices, during a cost of living crisis no-less! It’s no surprise that growth is stagnating for many across the industry.
They (we) must figure out how to attract the attention of this evolving new audience, convince them that we are trustworthy, and that their content and experience is valuable-enough to pay for.
AI, AI,AI
Like everyone else, the news industry has been massively disrupted by the (Generative) AI and ML boom we’re seeing all around us. I reckon I could write about 20 different blog posts on this topic alone, but there three points I think are specifically worth highlighting in the context of digital publishing and this post.
Firstly, the marketplace for attention is becoming increasingly saturated and competitive. As mentioned previously, it has already been challenging for incumbent publishers to keep up with major tech companies when it comes to expectations around user experience. This is only going to be exacerbated further by the AI boom, and new AI-enabled disruptors are joining the party too, to fight for consumer eyeballs and space on their app shelves.
Big tech companies are rapidly innovating with AI/ML applications to keep audiences engaged on their platforms, leveraging (gen)AI natively in their experiences, as well as to increase their productivity. It is also easier than ever to create a new platform or product to compete in the market as a disruptor by leveraging these new AI tools
Generative Search is just one example of this phenomenon, and has created an existential threat to publishers overnight. With a simple query, you can get a personalised news report or answer to your question, without ever having to click into a news article (the vast majority of online publisher traffic comes from Search). ~5% of people are going to GenAI products like ChatGPT already for their news updates, and OpenAI are looking like they’ll be launching their Search product by the end of 2024…
Secondly, the popularisation of AI following the launch of ChatGPT has changed attitudes in newsrooms towards this technology.
As I mentioned previously, the idea of AI and personalisation in news is certainly not new at all, and AI itself has been a concept since the 60s. However, there was a hesitancy and general risk aversion surrounding the technology in the editorial world. Now, since most of the internet-enabled world has had a play with ChatGPT, attitudes have changed. This isn’t just because of how evident the power/potential of the technology is through using such products, but it’s also because we are seeing how rapidly consumers are adopting it and changing their own perceptions around, previously vilified and demonised, AI technologies.
This is not an exclusive phenomenon in the world of Publishing - every executive boardroom in the world has probably heard the “we need to invest in AI now!” phrase in recent months - however, I believe there’s a nuanced difference in our industry. Those in editorial leadership teams now were there for the last time the industry got burnt by a major technology innovation like this - the rise of Search - and ChatGPT set alarms ringing to not let this happen again.
Finally, I believe the news industry has particularly outsized potential to leverage AI. I won’t give away too much sauce here, but I can confidently say that the core functions of a digital publisher (e.g. finding stories, writing them, curation of key pages, editing them, doing SEO optimisation, building technology to support the editorial functions, customer support etc) all have obvious, and often easily implemented places where AI could 10x productivity.
Moreover, I strongly agree with David Caswell that “Journalists make the best prompt engineers” - they are wordsmiths by trade, after all, and that they will be a major competitive advantage in this new consumer media world if publishers can leverage and enable to thrive them effectively.
I also believe there is huge potential to leverage GenAI especially for storytelling. We are already seeing GenAI being used ‘in the wild’ for reader-facing chatbots to let users dig deeper into stories, for AI audio narration, article summaries, and generating visual assets, to name a few things. What I’m most excited about is the next frontier: personalised storytelling - not just using AI to serve users the right story at the right time, but also to tell the story in the right way for that reader. I’ll leave that topic for another blog post (but look up ‘Modular Journalism’ if you’re curious!)
So - what should news publishers be doing about all of this?
As we enter into this fifth-era of online news, during the biggest technological revolution in decades (possibly since the industrial revolution!), there’s a lot for news publishers to be thinking about. Whilst there are massive opportunities, there are also clear, existential threats to their very existence as content distributors, and maybe even as content creators, if they can’t adapt - our backs are against the wall, and decisive action is required if we want to survive.
There are seven things that I have been thinking about a lot in this regard, and believe we need to focus on …
1. Telling better stories
First things first, we need to double-down on what journalism is all about - telling great stories. You can get your news from everywhere nowadays, and AI summaries/daily roundups are going to be everywhere too - but our key differentiator as publishers is, and needs to continue to be, storytelling. We must adapt to new format preferences and leverage new technology to make these stories more immersive and interactive. It also means leveraging this new technology to help editorial teams find new stories, spend less time on mundane tasks, and spend more time crafting pieces that will captivate readers better than any thread on X.
2. Demonstrating trust
As highlighted above, the public trust in news media organisations is declining, and with AI-generated content on the rise, it is imperative that we demonstrate why a reader should be able to trust what we have to say! Moreover, as the search engines also get smarter, the trustworthiness of our content is also going to be a key factor in maintaining top spots on search results pages: Google’s E.E.A.T framework speaks to this very point, and it’s a key component of how they evaluate content’s overall quality and credibility.
Whilst this might be a challenge for the likes of Reddit, for a news publisher this really should be our bread and butter (even if it means doing some controversial things like linking to other sites!). It’s not enough just to have great storytelling, we must also go out of our way to prove why we have experience, expertise and authority to tell these stories, and be transparent about how/why we reached our conclusions or opinions.
3. Becoming more reader-centric
Publishers need to re-evaluate their experience and value propositions to ensure they align with what their readers need and expect of modern products, to keep them coming back to our platforms. Moreover, they need to make sure they are serving users the right content, at the right time, for the right price too - personalisation might not always be the silver bullet here either. This also extends to content strategies, and ‘user needs’-based frameworks and approaches should be strongly considered.
4. Building our innovation ‘muscles’
It takes time and dedication to develop any skill, and innovation is a skill or capability like any other. Publishers need to build their ‘muscles’ when it comes to A/B testing, rapid iteration, Agile development, and working with AI in particular. Even if it means starting small, or in isolated areas of the business, this investment will compound rapidly. Furthermore, as I hope I’ve illustrated in this post so far, innovation is a core competency and differentiator in the marketplace for attention, which publishers are competing in right now, and we can’t afford to get left behind here.
5. Growing community
One of the key ways publishers can keep their audience coming back to their platforms is through their communities. We need to start thinking beyond the comment section ‘below the line’, and figure-out how best to connect our audience with each other, and also with our journalists. This might be on-platform, it might be off-platform, but either way, we should look to the playbook of social media companies and leverage the network and habit-building effects that a strong community can provide. It’s also a great way of getting feedback on your products to help drive innovation, to deepen your understanding of user needs, and to build trust in your platform.
6. It’s all about data, baby
News products are a goldmine for first-party user data, and even if the genAI platforms license (or steal) our content, we should be able to leverage what we know about our readers’ preferences and behaviours to keep them coming back to us, and to keep our content production aligned with what people want to consume. Great technology implementation and data strategy underpins all of this, so building a unified, reliable and accurate view of your readers’ data and wrapping best-in-class analytics software around this, to get insights to your teams effectively, must be a priority.
7. Managing change
Two colleagues (shout-out to Lucy and Nastassja!) talked about this with me over the last few days, and I told them that I’d be shamelessly stealing their excellent points on this topic to close-out this post.
A lot of what I’ve discussed above means major change for publishing organisations, and having worked at a Digital Transformation consultancy at the start of my career, I know first-hand that significant organisational change is really hard. If employees’ experience isn’t great, it’s unlikely they’ll create great experience for their customers. Publishing organisations need to invest heavily into change management efforts to ensure they can make it through this transitional period as smoothly as possible.
If you’ve made it here, thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed this and I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
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Ben