Predictions — said someone — are a fool’s game. But there’s little doubt that in the next year we will continue to bear painful witness to the decline of America’s formal news structures. Twentieth-century news outlets will keep crashing by the wayside — victims to changing business and technological models, to hubris, to cultural mistrust and to overall irrelevance in people’s daily lives.

But it’s also true that news and information won’t stop circulating and that people won’t stop talking to their neighbors about thorny topics.

People without free presses, or laws to protect journalists, have always found ways to collect and share news, to debate and compromise on the issues of the day. In a non-democratic country like Cuba, people have long passed flash drives hand to hand, containing stories unlikely to make it past the scrutiny of censors. In his book The Literary Underground of the Old Regime, Robert Darnton outlines all the ways French publishers in the 17th century managed to get their work out despite royal threats. Go into any neighborhood today in America, especially ones that have never been served by mainstream news organizations, and you’ll find people fulfilling the roles required by a free press — listener, reporter, synthesizer, convener, publisher, sense maker, and so on. You’ll find people who are trusted by their neighbors, acting as news collectors and sharers, as facilitators of difficult conversations and painful compromise.

I have long been interested in the idea of informal news networks, and what role these often unseen systems of communication might play in the future, as America slides further away from its democratic aspirations. In research I’ve conducted on the topic, I’ve learned about a barber in Baltimore who hosts casual discussion groups while cutting hair; a UPS driver in Central California who delivers sensitive information along with his packages; a woman in Detroit who documents neighborhood evictions in a self-published newsletter; the community college professors in Shasta, California who started a podcast during the Carr wildfires; and an elderly woman in Orange County who reads the news on a YouTube channel in her native Vietnamese dialect. I recently moved to a small rural town, and within two weeks I had identified our local “reporter”: a woman who knew everything and everyone, who could answer any question about local politics, local events, or local history, and had an uncanny ability to make everyone with whom she interacted trust her.

I do not feel foolish, therefore, to predict that informal news networks like these are going to play increasingly important roles in the near future. The question for professional journalists and other champions of the news business is this: Will we look down on these networks, ignore them, or join them?

It’s to all of our benefit to chose the latter path. Working together — professional newsrooms with individual community members, with local civic institutions, with parents groups, with faith-based organizations, with arts groups, and so on — we can strengthen and build local news systems that are resilient rather than brittle. News “products” can be face-to-face conversation, text chains, WhatsApp groups, wheat-pasted fliers, art exhibits, local discussions about international pieces of investigative journalism, Facebook groups, and YouTube channels — as well as written articles, podcasts, and video.

At Journalism + Design, we’ve chosen to partner with community colleges in this work. We co-design approaches to identifying and nurturing informal news networks, sometimes providing certificate programs in community journalism, sometimes partnering with local media outlets — such as Signal Cleveland, El Tímpano, and Fresnoland — and sometimes hosting photography exhibits at our physical space in Oakland, California. But that’s just how we’ve chosen to work. Once the goal is no longer to recreate news organizations as they existed in the past, but rather to ensure that reliable news and information flows — that there is a place in people’s lives for deliberation and debate — then possibility blossoms.

The recent presidential election has sent shockwaves through communities of people who care about a free press. It’s worth remembering for all the distraction of the president-elect himself, that this victory is the culmination of a hundred years of activism. Books like Invisible Hands: The Businessman’s Crusade by NYU professor Kim Phillips-Fien, Dark Money by The New Yorker writer Jane Mayer, and Democracy in Chains by historian Nancy MacLean tell the origin stories of today’s far-right libertarian movement — stretching back to the mid-1930s, when men like Irénée DuPont, president of the DuPont company, organized tirelessly against the New Deal, to the billions poured into libertarian causes by Charles Koch starting in the 1960s. All of those people were planting seeds that have been slowly coming to fruition decades and decades later.

Today, as we face what can feel like unsurmountable challenges, when we see a society failing in many of the ways most vital that it succeed, it can be easy to be demoralized. But this is just the moment when we need to be most diligent planting the seeds for the future we want — even if we won’t be there to see them bear fruit.

I predict that there are enough of us willing to step forward into the uncertainty and nurture the seeds of what could be.

General Douglas MacArthur once said, “In war, there is no substitute for victory.” In 2025, the media will heed this wisdom as it adopts an insurgent strategy to transition from survival to sustainability. Rather than playing by the rules of dominant platforms and entrenched forces, media organizations will redefine the battlefield, leveraging unconventional approaches to disrupt the status quo and reclaim their relevance.

Insurgents succeed because they know exactly what they are fighting against. The media industry must confront bad actors — whether misinformation campaigns, coordinated attacks on journalism, or exploitative platforms — with precision and determination. Incrementalism is no longer an option. Media insurgents must act with urgency and boldness, recognizing that the stakes are nothing less than the future of an informed public and a functioning democracy.

Like insurgents in warfare, the industry will prioritize agility, asymmetry, and the mobilization of resources. Instead of competing directly with platform-driven giants, media organizations will exploit vulnerabilities — emphasizing niche storytelling, hyper-personalized content, and community-driven initiatives. They will leverage emerging technologies like AI to streamline processes and amplify their storytelling capabilities. Collaboration will be key: Media insurgents will actively enlist allies from inside and outside journalism, forging partnerships that turn shared interests into collective power.

To truly succeed, media organizations must embrace what might sound heretical: propagandizing their mission — not with bias, but with conviction. Building a belief in journalism and civic engagement must start early, through initiatives like funding civic education programs, partnering with schools and places of worship, and integrating journalism into the curriculum. The insurgent knows that support is earned by defining the fight clearly and compellingly. There are only two outcomes: victory or defeat. And defeat becomes inevitable when the mission is left in the hands of others.

The insurgency will also punch back. Media organizations, intermediaries, and funders must develop robust countermeasures to debunk false narratives, expose bad actors, and protect the integrity of information platforms. Through transparency, advanced fact-checking, and strategic partnerships, they will respond with speed, accuracy, and moral authority, reinforcing their role as defenders of truth.

This insurgency will transform the media industry from defensive survival to offensive resilience. By embracing clarity of purpose, bold action, and collective resolve, the media will reclaim its role as an indispensable pillar of democracy. The stakes are clear, the fight is inevitable, and victory belongs to those who act decisively and refuse to let others define their story.

I want to share a news storytelling provocation for 2025, coming from a toolmaker who’s been building media prototypes with LLMs over the past year. My hope is that these capabilities will spark ideas from readers working in newsrooms.

First, I’ll share what I’ve noticed in using AI in creative tools and interfaces:

• AI is best used to augment, not replace. Instead of using AI to tell a story, build creative AI tools to help people tell stories.
• Our interfaces will become more welcoming, expressive, and adaptive. This is not just for software, it’s for writing too. Reading is an interface, and we have opportunities to improve the way people get information.

Second, here’s what I’ve noticed in media over the years:

• Everything must be a headline. Anything deeper is often lost or ignored. From a numbers standpoint, engagement drops as news media becomes interactive or subtle.
• Nuanced storytelling is crucial to understanding and navigating our complex world.

We’re caught in this tension. Social media pushes us toward simpler messages — bolder headlines, punchier takes, everything feels flattened. Yet at the same time, the world grows more complex, and stories must have more nuance, more context, and more perspectives.

We can move from flat to dimensional stories with the new interfaces powered by LLMs. I’ve been prototyping what this might look like:

• Zoom Summaries lets you slide between different lengths of the same story. You can have a one-paragraph summary to a two-word headline. The original text becomes liquid, and you can imagine it adapting to its context.
• Summaries Tree renders an article as a tree of nested summaries. Start with the big picture, then go deeper into the parts that matter to you. Explore the story at your own pace, where you want, how you want.
• Website Embeddings Map turns a blog into an explorable map using embeddings, where similar posts cluster together. Hover over any point and get a preview of that post. It’s a new way to get an overview of a site and browse stories.
• AI Reader Assistant augments your reading experience, letting you expand sections inline for more context, get simpler explanations, or dive deeper into concepts — all while staying in the flow of the story.
• SmartNav reimagines how we find and browse information on websites. Instead of hunting through menus and search results, you express what you’re looking for, and the site brings relevant information to you, rendered with a dynamic UI. When tested on MIT’s expansive resources, it surfaced useful content that was previously unsearchable, buried in university blogs and scattered across different pages.

These interfaces offer new ways to think about how we understand complex information. When you let readers explore stories spatially rather than linearly, you tap into the strong human intuition for spatial understanding. When you give them tools to transform text — to simplify it, expand it, or relate it to their own context — they engage more deeply. The LLM text generation in these tools does not replace articles and stories, it augments them. For a familiar example, consider a table of contexts — it doesn’t replace the text, it augments the experience of reading.

The capabilities are here, and now it’s a matter of bringing them to expert storytellers. This coming year, we’ll see more “dimensional” interfaces that let readers explore stories from multiple angles and depths. The bold headline grabs your attention, and then becomes a gateway to deeper exploration and understanding. Now is the time to reimagine what news stories can be when we augment them beyond the constraints of the flat page.

“Don’t read the comments.”

It’s advice editors often give writers when their first piece goes viral online. Yet it’s always struck me as odd guidance — why publish on the internet, a medium built for interconnection, only to ignore how readers respond to your work? What “don’t read the comments” almost always really means is “our comments section is trash.” And a trash comments section is reflective of a larger, longer-term mistake of not investing in moderation.

In the best circumstances, the web’s interplay creates something magical: Writers share insights while readers — often writers themselves — deepen the conversation and add valuable context. It’s a meaningful interaction for all involved, and a reliable level for growth, if done well.

And yet. We’ve all witnessed comment sections deteriorate, whether on a single post or across an entire platform (see: x.com).

One key difference between thriving and flailing online spaces? Well-crafted moderation policies, effectively enforced.

2025 will amplify an existing trend: the growing divide between online spaces that invest in moderation and those that don’t. X’s first transparency report since Elon Musk took over shows the platform received over 66 million user reports of hateful conduct in the first half of 2024, but suspended only 2,361 accounts. Part of the reason is likely the change in direction of its content policy over the last few years, including removing protections for transgender users. And many platforms are doing what TikTok did in October — laying off human content moderation teams and replacing them with AI.

Bluesky, meanwhile, recently announced it was quadrupling the size of its content moderation team.

Readers want some level of protection from hateful content. They want a robust, understandable set of rules about what conduct is and isn’t acceptable, and the knowledge those rules will be enforced fairly and consistently.

There are good comments sections online, but they’re never an accident. It takes intention, focus, and the will to have rules and believe in them to create a shared online space that works. This year we’ll see that tension — the laissez-faire approach vs. robust moderation — play out across the web in ways big and small. Engaged readers will be watching.

I was ready to break up with journalism in 2020 when I decided to go to divinity school for a chaplaincy degree. My physical, mental, and spiritual burnout was real, but so was an emerging sense of hope because of the hundreds of mutual-aid networks and uprisings that cropped up that year. I realized that, instead of leaving the field altogether, I needed to go harder on breaking up with some bad habits the industry (and this includes the emerging nonprofit wing of the field) had normalized.

Given the uncertain, unprecedented political and economic times, I’m praying 2025 will humble more of us to go through these breakups. We deserve better! And more importantly, so do our communities.

I predict the endings around us will continue to bring us to our knees and that perhaps that is the best vantage point to reimagine everything. As Detroit labor activist Grace Lee Boggs said, “We have to think not only about change in our institutions, but changes in ourselves.” If hospital and prison chaplaincy work taught me anything, it’s that, unfortunately, crisis is a precursor to this kind of change. (Though not always — some folks double down on the familiar.) I have faith that walking away from three particularly bad habits will make space for transformative journalism.

Breaking up sustainability with business

When did sustainability — which Merriam-Webster defines as “of, relating to, or being a method of harvesting or using a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged” — become synonymous with the capitalistic business of revenue making for our industry? Sustainability should be determined by community ecology models, not revenue models.

By linking these two, consciously or unconsciously, we’re missing an opportunity to build long-haul, people-powered infrastructure and going down the dangerous, slippery slope of efficiency. As the prophecy goes, “more money, more problems,” and in this case, it’s not just using environmentally catastrophic tools that cut costs or help us raise more money. Treating journalism like a business instead of a public good is a fast track to erasing “public” and replacing it with “commodified.”

A sustainable approach opens up opportunities to collaborate, be it with other outlets sharing back office staff, partnering with libraries to host events or insert another example of building with your community for the sake of care, not consumption. Given the political environment, next year will only seek to divide us further through fear, dismantling this bad behavior now ensures we meet the moment with interdependence not hyper-individualism.

Breaking up impact metrics with growth for growth’s sake

Numerous studies about news consumption all sing the same song — communities want information they can act on. I feel like we’ve known this is a toxic habit for a long time, but the climate, political reckoning of the next year will drive it home. What’s fun about the harmful behavior above is that it flows into the habit of conflating impact metrics with growth for growth’s sake. Counting clicks, website traffic, or any number without humanizing, geographizing, or whatever else indicates you know who your readers are is meaningless unless your actual target audience is advertisers, investors, or philanthropy. Treating who reads you as a number is a way to avoid the true responsibility of the press — to hold power to account and educate the public so they can act.

We got a glimpse of this in North Carolina in the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Some outlets were keeping body count tolls, while others were figuring out how neighbors could learn who around them had generators. So if the high school civics teacher or the neighborhood grandma doesn’t know about you — what difference does it truly make?

Breaking up with our god complex

Perhaps the most insidious habit all of the above begets is our god complex. In his latest book, The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes: “It is the journalists themselves who are playing god — it is the journalists who decide which sides are legitimate and which are not, which views shall be considered and which pushed out of the frame. And this power is an extension of the power of other curators of the culture — network execs, producers, publishers — whose core job is deciding which stories get told and which do not.”

The power we wield as authors of the first draft of history means we’ve been complicit in building the political climate. Our power doesn’t have to be a tool of the oppressor but if we keep emphasizing numbers and growth then it will be. Are we able, as Coates does so profoundly, to point the finger at ourselves and to acknowledge when we’ve been wrong?

We know that next year will bring ensuing chaos. I believe these breakups will again be on the table, harder truths to swallow. But I predict that if we let these habits go we will, to paraphrase the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, be choosing community over chaos.

The darkness that democracy dies in is here.

Some might call that hyperbolic, but as a practitioner, scholar, and close observer of journalism for more than 25 years, I’ve lost faith that well-meaning criticism of journalists who engage in horse-race coverage, false equivalence, and lazy, narrow ways of defining objectivity will make any meaningful difference. The excellent reporting many prominent outlets did about the candidates and their policies didn’t break through to the many voters who either prefer to live in the alternative-facts universe of right-wing media or were turned off by the absurd sanewashing of Trump and his allies. This election was decided in no small part by voters who believed a number of false things about the candidates and the country. The Fourth Estate has failed.

The only way forward for journalism in 2025 is to prioritize mutual aid and collaboration with people in other fields who have expertise in listening, organizing, and, most importantly, belonging. Unless and until we’re able to bring people together at the local level and start new conversations about how we govern ourselves and build the social capital essential for healthy communities, little will change.

Of course, this isn’t a new idea. I and many other engagement journalism practitioners have argued for years that journalists can only address their ongoing crisis of trust by listening to and building relationships with the people we serve. These efforts have not been in vain; University of Wisconsin journalism professor Sue Robinson has documented the impacts of no less than 30 journalism initiatives that promote engaged journalism practices to build trust. Her extensive research on these efforts led her to describe it as a paradigm shift to a more participatory form of journalism. The alumni from the master’s program in engagement journalism I founded and led for ten years at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY before coming to Montclair State this fall continue to do meaningful work, as do many others. But it is not enough.

Solidarity journalism, which argues that journalists “must stand for basic human dignity and against suffering” by framing stories in ways that “center the lived experiences of people subjected to unjust conditions,” and movement journalism, which is focused on “collaboration between journalists and grassroots movements, and supporting journalism created by oppressed and marginalized people,” have already developed frameworks and practices we need. It is time for more of us to practice — and even more importantly — fight for these approaches.

Journalism schools need to find more ways to collaborate across disciplines in 2025 to expand the skill set journalism students learn beyond reporting and storytelling, and get students in other majors to think critically with us about information, how it is produced and distributed, and the role that it plays in advancing different social goals and building community.

The Jersey Bee, founded and led by one of my former students, Simon Galperin, prioritizes events that connect people locally and facilitate discussion, shared understanding and collective problem solving, as well as explainer journalism that can help people with solve concrete, basic problems in their life, like how to access reproductive health care, apply for SNAP benefits, or run for mayor. It is unapologetically committed not to reflexive neutrality but to improving the quality of life for everyone in the community, particularly those with fewer resources. If we really care about bringing healthy democracy back, this is the way.

The hundreds of journalists Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel surveyed for their book Elements of Journalism once agreed that their fundamental purpose was to “give people the information they need to be free and govern themselves.” Those that still believe in this purpose must be committed to a journalism that is not just about informing, but also about belonging.

For better or worse, I don’t think there will be a “Trump Bump” in traffic to news websites during the second Trump administration. There are a bunch of reasons that levels of interest (and/or shock) aren’t what they were eight years ago: news fatigue, Trump’s (slight) popular vote win, self-preservation. There will surely be some traffic spikes in moments of congressional combat or when Trump announces a particularly egregious executive action — and we’ve seen a few post-election bumps during this cabinet nomination process — but it’s already looking like 2025 will have little in common with 2017 in terms of eyeballs to our respective domains.

For those of us who aren’t in the straight political reporting business, there’s an opportunity to cover Trump differently this time. We don’t need to sustain our astonishment or tap into our own panic and worry every time he says or does something heretofore unfathomable. (After all, it’s all fathomable now?) As we prepare for a seismic change in Washington — given Trump’s promises/threats — we can get more attuned to what our audiences need and want from us during this second round of Life Under Trump. Yes, we’ll still explain tariffs and supply chains and why your new iPhone costs twice as much as your last. But we’ll also look at popular culture in a different way, and how people are getting their politics via Taylor Sheridan, or Steve Bannon. And we will, of course, still provide escapism with, let’s say, a beautifully illustrated list of important recipes.

It also means that instead of chasing traffic, we will focus more on building membership, and deepening our relationships with our audience. We always want new readers to find us, but serving our most loyal and engaged readers is an opportunity for now, and the future.

August 19, 2023 may well have been the day that journalism’s enthusiasm for artificial intelligence began its descent into the trough of disillusionment. That’s when Gannett published a wince-worthy report on a high school soccer match that would have gone largely unnoticed if it had not been obviously written by an AI bot that knew little about sports…and may have also been drunk:

“The Worthington Christian [[WINNING_TEAM_MASCOT]] defeated the Westerville North [[LOSING_TEAM_MASCOT]] 2-1 in an Ohio boys soccer game on Saturday.”

“Worthington Christian edged Westerville North 2-1 in a close encounter of the athletic kind for an Ohio boys soccer victory on Aug. 19,” the report continued.

The mocking of that story — and others generated by a tool made by an outside firm and published by the news giant — started immediately. Gannett quickly paused its experiment.

For people familiar with the Gartner Hype Cycle, this was inevitable. The Hype Cycle is a visual representation of the ups, downs, and plateaus of a new technology over a period of time. First comes the Innovation Trigger — in this case, the rollout of generative AI for the lay public in November 2022 (though artificial intelligence had been around and in good use for years before then). Then came the Period of Inflated Expectations, when people could create art with a few simple text prompts (“Look Ma, I can create a green monkey dancing on the moon, and I can’t even draw!”), followed by the almost mass hysteria over ChatGPT when it was discovered it could write school essays, tighten up resumes, imitate voices, and create broadcast scripts. Almost every newscast reporting on the technology had some version of “That report you just heard was written entirely by a robot!”

Then comes the inevitable slide into the Trough of Disillusionment, when the hype folks discover that the tech is far from perfect. In AI’s case, there were the “hallucinations,” where the programs simply made up material, and the image generation tools that didn’t take direction well or correctly display the typical number of human fingers on a human hand.

But with most technologies that enter the Hype Cycle, there eventually comes the Slope of Enlightenment (“Wait, this technology can sift through a trove of documents and summarize it faster than I can, especially on deadline”) and the Plateau of Productivity.

I believe we’re entering the plateau, and this phase will accelerate in 2025. Journalists who were and remain rightfully skeptical of AI and its impact on our profession — from eliminating jobs to adding to the public’s souring on our trustworthiness — are starting to build stuff. Good stuff. Newsrooms such as the San Francisco Chronicle are rooting around in the archives to feed a bot that can surface restaurant reviews written by Chronicle staffers to compete with review apps such as Yelp. A company called Nota, created by former Los Angeles Times technologists, makes a WordPress plugin that can suggest headlines, art, and social media posts for harried editors — who are free to modify the suggestions or discard them altogether. Tools to help with newsroom investigations, such as data-sorting tools and summarizing long interviews, are just the tip of the iceberg, as we come around to the idea of AI being a partner rather than a boogeyman in the newsroom.

My students at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism were largely wary of AI at the beginning of my Business and Future of Journalism course at the start of this past semester, but then in groups prototyped eight unique AI-driven bots or tools that help with fact-checking, bias detection, media literacy, and ethical decision making for photographers. Others came up with AI tools to detect fashion trends and gaps in reporting. They know the dangers of AI, but they also now see the promise of this technology. I predict many more journalists will join them.

Anyone with a sunny outlook for 2025 is delusional.

Journalism faces an existential crisis, and whether we can meet the moment collectively will be telling. Here are four areas I predict we will be hearing a lot about in 2025, all interconnected.

Trust

I spent 30 years in mainstream media, including some big jobs at places like the L.A. Times, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal. At all of them, we twisted ourselves into knots asking why audiences didn’t trust us. It took me much less time through my work at Epicenter, a local news site launched in Queens during the pandemic, to answer. First, I had to flip the question into the affirmative: How do you gain trust with communities? What I discovered is something social workers and brand marketers alike already know. You help people once and they’ll call you again — and again. That action, of turning to you, seeking you out, represents trust.

And so in the days after helping someone secure, say, a covid vaccine appointment, we found ourselves inundated with requests, non-health-related. Can you help me find an English tutor? Where can I find a one-bedroom for under $2,000 in Brooklyn? This pattern repeated itself after the U.S. presidential election. A sample of the questions we are receiving right now:

• Should I renew my passport?
• I run a small business. How liquid do I need to be?
• My child is 23 and on my health plan. What if the Affordable Care Act is overturned?
• We applied for Section 8 housing in NYC, opened up for the first time in 15 years. What happens if vouchers are abandoned?

We may not have all the answers, but we vow to keep being there for our communities, who seem all too willing to guide our news agenda, if only we keep listening and serving and helping.

It’s no longer enough to meet people where they are. Building trust relies on us actually doing something.

The robots

Media across sizes and regions feel wildly divided on the role of generative AI in their newsrooms. On the one hand, The New York Times is suing Microsoft and OpenAI alleging copyright infringement. For many local outlets who arrive to news stories months, even years before mainstream media, we know this frustration well: seeing something built on our backs, often not credited, rising to virality and prominence and, perhaps, profit.

Meanwhile, smaller publishers have been quick to weave AI into their processes, and leave the impossible fights to the big guys. Most of us don’t have the luxury of creating committees to “study” AI, yet we can’t afford to be left behind. Some of the greatest innovations I see in AI tools come from outlets such as The Jersey Bee, which is mining websites, event listings, Facebook groups, and other online mentions to generate dozens of micro-newsletters every week. At Epicenter, we recently turned to another AI tool, GovWire, to cover an evening community meeting and emerged with a report that is part-human, part-AI and emblematic of what’s possible. We saved about a day’s work thanks to the tool.

There are rightful ethical questions over the role of AI in our newsrooms, from transparency and disclosures of who wrote/produced/created what to the displacement of workers already on shaky ground. But righteousness feels a dangerous, privileged perch as the robots march on and ahead.

Only by locking arms can we take control, achieve efficiencies, revolutionize roles, and guide the technology toward serving the greater good.

Revenue

There is a single crisis in journalism, and from it all other problems emanate: money.

In 2025, journalists will have to get more comfortable not just understanding and explaining how their employers make money but being a part of the solution. We can no longer be media companies bragging about the Chinese wall and organized into opposing sides, meaning one side makes money and another spends it. Editorial operations will need to jump headfirst into revenue opportunities such as deeply reported, paywalled content and reports; or data-driven insights around audience and consumption; or events and opportunities for audiences to connect to talent and newsmakers.

These trends have been underfoot for some time now. The best example is likely The New York Times’ subscription growth. About a decade ago, a staffer explained to me why the paper was so focused on a subscription strategy: not just to generate revenue, but to unite multiple departments around a common cause.

Today, media organizations, and all the person they employ, need to rally around revenue. I am worried about the number of journalists I meet who have no idea how advertising works, let alone the world of digital media advertising (run, do not walk, to learn terms like CPMs, programmatic, and GAM).

I speak as one of the ignorant. Five years ago, when I left mainstream media to launch my own companies, I thought I had had enough exposure to the business “side.” But it’s taken me landing deals, making payroll and growing customers to internalize these lessons and apply them.

When people ask me if the revenue hires of our future really need to understand ad sales, audience growth, philanthropic funding, product innovation, and diversified business models, I say yes to all of the above. Plus, they need to lead with compassion and charisma. I do so not knowing if training workforces adept in such rapidly changing skills is even possible. But they are who we need to helm our newsrooms.

Talent

On that note, I speak to unemployed journalists virtually every day looking for work — and also to hiring managers who have scant few jobs but tell me they can’t find the right people despite the hordes applying. This mismatch underscores the talent crisis in our industry.

Right now, it is very, very hard for me to talk to someone who wants to be a journalist and assure them there is a viable path ahead. I decided to embrace the calling at the age of 12 when my family moved from Puerto Rico to New Jersey. I joined the school newspaper and found myself interviewing the principal in my first week. Now I’m 48. I find myself reinventing my relationship with our profession and reassessing my skills at least every six months, often more frequently. Once upon a time, that was more likely an every three- to four-year exercise. I do not know if humans can face such uncertainty and emerge unjaded or unscathed.

So I take those desperate phone calls — two or three a day. Do everything you can, I advise. Use Gemini. Learn Mailchimp and ConvertKit and Beehiiv. Study aggressive audience acquisition tactics. And please, please, don’t forget to report and write. Stay curious. Get comfortable with smaller audiences and hope they might care and connect to what you have to say. I’m rooting for you.

AI is everywhere. Amidst all the doom and hype, newsrooms are discovering a wide range of use cases for AI in journalism and its workflows. However, as with any emerging technology, this often leads to the mindless application of tools.

For instance, in India, TV news channels are now filled with AI anchors. In a market notorious for misinformation, bigotry, and government propaganda, introducing an AI anchor does little to address the trust deficit among viewers. This is what I call “using AI for AI’s sake”— employing a tool not to solve a problem or benefit users, but merely as a flashy novelty.

That said, globally, there have been excellent examples of AI applications in newsrooms — streamlining workflows, automating tedious tasks, and aiding investigative journalism. AI is already becoming an integral part of newsroom operations and product development.

However, one area where AI is underutilized — and one I believe will gain traction in 2025 — is in making news products more accessible.

Thanks to advances in assistive technology and the efforts made by tech giants to bake accessibility into their design, much of the internet is, by and large, accessible. Yet most news platforms continue to be inaccessible. News platforms in the Global South, in particular, often fall short. Even in the U.S. and Europe, accessibility is frequently treated as a bare-minimum compliance measure to avoid lawsuits, rather than as an essential feature.

There are several reasons accessibility remains sidelined in newsrooms, regardless of size, region, or language. These include weak regulations, lack of awareness among leadership, and (especially) resource constraints. Many newsrooms, large and small, lack the bandwidth for both the technical overhaul required to ensure accessibility and the day-to-day tasks that support it, such as adding captions, transcriptions, and alt text.

These challenges aren’t unique to smaller newsrooms. Even some of the largest outlets in the Global South struggle with accessibility — not for a lack of intent, but because retrofitting outdated tech stacks to meet accessibility standards can be a monumental task. On the other hand, newer newsrooms may prioritize basic accessibility features but lack resources for subtitling podcasts or crafting high-quality alt text. This is where AI can step in to bridge the gap.

Earlier this year, we overhauled the Newslaundry website to make it accessible. Beyond technical upgrades, we integrated AI into our production and publishing workflows, automating tasks like generating subtitles and transcriptions for podcasts.

During my time as part of the inaugural AI Journalism Lab at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, I was exposed to AI thought leaders and cutting-edge experiments in the field. This inspired me to explore how AI could be leveraged to make news products more accessible. Our accessibility efforts didn’t just make our platform more inclusive — they also attracted new paying subscribers. This demonstrated that AI-driven accessibility isn’t only better product design but also good business.

By neglecting accessibility, news platforms discriminate against people with disabilities. In India alone, there are at least 25 million people with disabilities. As publishers face subscription fatigue and declining audience engagement, addressing accessibility could unlock entirely new segments of readers.

This is why I predict that more newsrooms will turn to AI in the coming year to make their products accessible. AI can address major barriers to accessibility, from reducing manual effort to enabling cost-effective tech solutions. For instance, imagine an AI chatbot trained on the brilliant alt-text resources created by the BBC in a newsroom where desk editors are too swamped to write and add alt text for all images and infographics. Or a tool built on inclusive storytelling guidelines, helping editors save time in checking whether the sources and subjects mentioned in the story reflect the experiences of diverse communities — not just dominant voices in terms of class, caste, gender, and race.

Perhaps we’ll even see an AI anchor that genuinely addresses accessibility needs — like one capable of sign language interpretation.