Journalism Today. 22 Apr 2025

By Eduardo Suárez and Gretel Kahn

🗞️ 3 top news stories

1. The fault line emerging in the debates around AI and the future of news. A new essay by AI expert David Caswell warns about the growing divide between those journalists embracing this emerging technology as a way to improve the news ecosystem and those alerting about the dangers it poses for their colleagues and for society as a whole. The piece mentions several panels at the International Journalism Festival and argues for several ways to bridge that gap. | Read

💬 A key quote: “The Vanguard should be more focused on the reality of this adoption rather than on building exciting AI ‘shiny things’ for their own sake. The Rearguard should perhaps acknowledge that audiences are intentionally choosing to use AI, are getting real value from it, and are mostly not being manipulated or entrapped,” Caswell writes. 

• Read our own takeaways from the International Journalism Festival in Perugia

2. Google’s AI Overviews reduce traffic substantially. A new post by Ryan Law from Ahrefs looks at the impact of AI Overviews over search traffic. Law and his colleagues analysed 300,000 keywords and found that the presence of an AI Overview in the search results correlated with a 34.5% lower average clickthrough rate (CTR) for the top-ranking page, compared to similar informational keywords without an AI Overview. | Read 

📊 A datapoint from our research. Around three-quarters (74%) of our survey of more than 300 media managers say they are worried about a potential decline in referral traffic from search engines in 2025. However, data sourced for this report from analytics provider Chartbeat shows that aggregate traffic  from Google search remains stable for now. | Read our report

3. Journalists in Ecuador are facing increasing risks. Increasing violence in Ecuador’s northern border is putting more and more journalists at risk as they document the troubled region, writes César López Linares for Latin America Journalism Review. Legal persecution, threats to family members and job precarity are further causing journalists in the country to self-censor and avoid covering gang-related topics. Lack of institutional support and low-salaries are making journalists question the industry altogether. | Read

💬 A key quote: “We have no representation – no institution behind or in front of us to protect us – and we’re clearly exposed to risks that a major news outlet might be better equipped to handle. Financially, our situation is precarious. We’re like small entrepreneurs, almost like street vendors who live off the day to day,” says independent reporter Henry Córdova. 

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📊 Chart of the day

🎞️ Video and social. With consumer attention switching to video, publishers say they are planning to put more effort into YouTube (+52 on our net score), TikTok (+48) and Instagram (+43). By contrast, publisher sentiment towards X/Twitter (-68 net score) has worsened this year following the politicisation of the network under Elon Musk. The Guardian, Dagens Nyheter, and La Vanguardia are amongst the big legacy outlets to have stopped posting on X, with Bluesky (+38) a key focus for many. | Read the report

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☕ Coffee break

Our friends at The Fix have published their own takeaways from the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. “It’s unlikely we will face a shortage of quality news content,” they write, “but we might need to pay a bit more for it.” | Read

Sewell Chan, editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, was fired over the weekend following staff complaints about his behavior. Chan offered his own version of the story in a LinkedIn long post. | Read

Bluesky has launched a new verification process. It mixes the old-school, Twitter-style blue check bestowed by the platform with a more decentralised option for trusted organizations. | Read

The National Science Foundation has cancelled hundreds of research grants related to misinformation and disinformation. Researchers involved in these projects received an email last Friday afternoon. | Read 

After Pope Francis’ death, it’s worth reading this piece by CJR’s Sacha Biazzo featuring several Vaticanisti, the Italian term for the press corps that covers the pope. | Read 

The New York Times has published a very useful visual story explaining how the White House briefing room has changed after Donald Trump’s return to power. | Read

Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell profiles Acyn Torabi, a 40-something single dad shaping American social media with fast-cut clips of political mayhem. | Read 

Despite increasing news avoidance, Joy Mayer, the founder of Trusting News, says in this interview that transparency, humility, and smart word choices can help newsrooms regain skeptical audiences. | Read

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📚 One piece from our archive

Intergenerational dynamics at work. A project by our Journalist Fellow Sheo Be Ho looks at intergenerational tensions in newsrooms, focusing on Singapore. Sheo Be Ho's paper is inspired by her own experience as a senior member of her newsroom at Singapore's Chinese language daily, Lianhe Zaobao, and based on a questionnaire distributed to both young and older journalists at five Singaporean newspapers. | Read

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