The media industry had a brutal 2023. This year could be just as bad

The media industry ended 2023 in rough shape, with a series of layoffs that saw more than 20,000 people lose their jobs. So what do the next 12 months have in store for journalism and the sector at large? Each year, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford releases its predictions for the year ahead, courtesy of senior research associate Nic Newman.

Unfortunately, Newman’s forecast—which is based on a survey of 314 media leaders from 56 countries worldwide—isn’t too rosy.

Here are some of Newman’s key trends and predictions, as reflected through the survey respondents’ thoughts:

Media facing a collapse in social traffic. Organizations including PBS have left X, formerly Twitter, after unease about the future direction of the platform under Elon Musk’s ownership. When NPR left X in April 2023, it saw a single percentage point decrease in traffic to its site. Data gathered by the Reuters Institute through Chartbeat suggests that the broader media industry has seen a more significant impact: traffic referrals from X dropped 27% in 2023, while traffic from Facebook fell 48%. “The big fear is that search traffic may be next, as AI-powered results provide answers directly in the interface, rather than offering so many links to news sites,” Newman writes.
AI revenue won’t save journalism. While The New York Times is pursuing OpenAI in court for allegedly breaching its copyright to use journalism source material to train its large language models, publishers think that revenue from granting rights to AI companies to legally harness their data for training purposes won’t be the lifeboat some hope it is. Around half of media managers quizzed by the Reuters Institute think there’ll be “very little” money for publishers making licensing deals with AI platforms. And with The Information reporting that OpenAI is lowballing publishers by offering as little as $1 million a year to train on their data, the media experts may be right.
Media companies will be putting their eggs in Meta’s basket. While Facebook traffic has crashed in 2023, journalism outlets are still keen to embrace other opportunities to connect audiences to their work offered by Meta, Facebook’s parent company. The time and effort publishers are withdrawing from promoting work on X and Facebook will be put into WhatsApp and Instagram, thanks to Meta’s decision to open up broadcast channels for publishers.
Subscriptions will become more common. Paywalls like those that Fast Company and other organizations put around some of their stories are an important revenue stream as other methods of funding journalism collapse—with 80% of those surveyed saying it’s important. More depressingly, less than half of respondents say they’re confident about journalism’s prospects in the year ahead, and one in eight are outright pessimistic about the future.