The annual Digital News Report, released this week by the Reuters Institute of Journalism at Oxford University, has revealed a shift in global news consumption patterns through a survey of 48 countries and nearly 97,000 people. The report indicates that there has been a significant increase in the number of users starting to use the AI chat robot to read news and access updates.
Although only 7 per cent of respondents now indicate that they are searching for news using AIT robots, the younger population is even more numerous: 12 per cent of the population under 35 and 15 per cent of the population under 25 rely on such tools as the ChatGPT of OpenAI, Gemini of Google or Llama of Meta.
Mitali Mukherjee, Director of the Reuters Institute of Journalism at Oxford University, referred to this way of using AI to access information as a “new chapter” in audience information consumption. “Personalization, fragmentation and rapidization are the information needs of young audiences, and the AI tools are precisely meeting those needs.” Mookji emphasized.
Users not only read news titles using AI but also perform more complex operations. Twenty-seven per cent were for press summaries, 24 per cent for translation and 21 per cent for content recommendations. Nearly one fifth of users consult AI directly on current events. However, the crisis of confidence created by AI remains the main obstacle to its expansion. Many interviewees expressed concern that AI could lead to a decrease in the transparency of news reports and an increase in error rates. The problem of “phantoms” when talking robots create information continues to haunt readers and news practitioners.
In the face of risks, some news agencies see opportunities. Agence France-Presse has reached an agreement with the French AAI company Mistral to authorize it to use the press archives training AI model. Media, such as The New York Times, have taken a confrontational stance and prosecuted developers such as OpenAI for unauthorized misuse of their content.
The report also highlights the current situation where traditional media, such as television, radio, newspapers and news stations, are being squeezed by social networks and short video platforms.According to the report, nearly half of the 18 to 24-year-old population indicated that access to information was mainly through social media, with a particular reliance on TikTok, a platform that dominated young users such as India, Brazil, Indonesia and Thailand. TikTok recommends the rapid delivery of news content through short video and algorithms, which attracts more users in an interactive and instantaneous manner. TikTok, in particular, has a personalized recommended algorithm that enables the user to send the required content with precision and make it more competitive in the transmission of information.
Despite the turmoil of the Mask acquisition and rebranding, platform X remains an important source of news. In the United States, 23 per cent of people use X for news (an increase of 8 percentage points over last year), and Australia and Poland show a similar trend. By contrast, X alternative platforms, such as Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon, have not yet developed in size in the field of public information, each with a market share of less than 2 per cent.
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