2025 in Review: A Media News Recap

Media news headlines in 2025 were defined by a major shift in how news is gathered, funded and protected. From the White House’s decision to bar the Associated Press and slash public media funding to the Pentagon’s restrictive new press rules, the relationship between the state and the fourth estate dominated headlines.

Meanwhile, newsrooms navigated the precarious “AI transition,” figuring out how to balance the efficiency of automation with the necessity of human oversight and reporting. All of it amidst a backdrop of industry-wide layoffs. In this post, we take a look back on the year’s major media industry headlines, which show the industry working to redefine and solidify its value in a world of shrinking access and expanding algorithms.

2025 Predictions: What Were We Expecting?

Before we dive into some of the year’s major media stories, let’s look back at what some industry experts were expecting to see in 2025:

• CJR staffers were watching for issues like legal threats against the press and how legacy media would compete with alternative media sources to keep readers engaged and coming back.
• For CNBC, one anonymous source predicted that Comcast would acquire the studio and streaming assets of Warner Bros. Discovery, while another source predicted that Fox would be the buyer. I think we all know where that one stands at the moment.
• In a survey of digital media experts for the Reuters Institute , 74% of respondents said they were worried about a potential decline in referral traffic from search engines. As a result, many predicted that publishers would work to build stronger relationships with AI companies. See the AI section below to see how this one turned out.

Now, onto the recap.

A Year of Tension for the Press and the White House

While writing this recap, it was difficult to condense all the year’s stories about the press and administration’s fraught (to put it nicely) relationship into one short(ish) section. It’s felt like a new attack on the press, lawsuit or other breaking story was reported at least weekly throughout the past year, if not more often.

Media outlets were preparing for a rough road ahead even before President Trump’s inauguration in January, but it’s difficult to believe anyone anticipated all of the developments that would occur.

Some of the year’s biggest stories include:

• AP Ban: The Associated Press was banned from White House events in the Oval Office and on Air Force One after the outlet announced its decision to keep using “Gulf of Mexico” in its reporting, rather than changing it to “Gulf of America,” as the administration renamed it in an executive order. The ban resulted in a lawsuit that is still ongoing, with a lower court ruling in favor of the AP and an appeals court later partly reinstating the ban.
• Government-Funded Media: The year saw significant changes to U.S. government-funded media, beginning with an executive order in May that directed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) to cease all funding for NPR and PBS due to alleged bias. This was followed by Congress approving a rescissions package in July that eliminated all federal funding for the CPB for fiscal years 2026 and 2027, a move that forced the CPB to begin winding down operations. Separately, the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) also faced drastic funding cuts, leading to the termination of funding for international networks like Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The cuts prompted lawsuits from NPR and PBS, and the loss of federal funds is expected to be particularly devastating for smaller, local public media stations, especially those in rural and underserved communities.
• Briefing Room Change-Up: The White House made early changes to the seating chart in the briefing room, reserving front row seats for those from “new media” outlets. The White House received over 7,000 new media press credential requests within 24 hours of the announcement. Soon after, the White House announced it would take control of which outlets were allowed in the press pool, a responsibility that typically belonged to the White House Correspondents Association. Here’s an interactive look at how the briefing room changed.
• New Pentagon Press Rules: The Pentagon made the surprising move in February to force outlets including The New York Times, NBC News, NPR and Politico to give up their long-held dedicated office spaces in the building to make way for other outlets like Breitbart News and One America News. Then, in October, the changes escalated when the Pentagon revoked press passes for all reporters/outlets that refused to sign new restrictive rules that publishers claimed violated their First Amendment rights. The result was a mass exodus of mainstream outlets from the building. Several weeks ago, The New York Times filed a lawsuit in response to the new policy.
• Media Shaming: The day after Thanksgiving, the White House published a new section on its website with the header “Misleading. Biased. Exposed.” It disparages publishers and individual reporters whose coverage the administration disagrees with or feels is inaccurate. In a formal letter to the White House, SPJ requested that the page be immediately taken down. While SPJ “respects the Administration’s right to challenge or criticize coverage that it deems as unfair or inaccurate,” the letter says, “…this should not be done via a page on the website of the highest office in the country that denigrates and attacks reporters, categorizing their work as ‘lies,’ ‘left-wing lunacy,’ and ‘malpractice,’ among other ‘categories.’”
• Attacks on TV Networks: Paramount paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit Trump filed against CBS News, which claimed the network deceptively edited an interview with Kamala Harris that aired before the 2024 presidential election. In a recent twist, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) called on newly appointed CBS News ombudsperson Ken Weinstein to provide more information about how it edited an interview with President Trump that aired on “60 Minutes.” Throughout the year, the President made multiple calls for the FCC to strip news networks of their broadcast licenses, including MSNBC (now called MS NOW), NBC and ABC.

Poynter has been tracking attacks on the press, which include the funding cuts, loss of access, source intimidation and more.

It’s fascinating to look back at Semafor’s “Three media stories to watch for the next 4 years” from last January, which pretty much nailed these stories on the head for year 1, including Trump’s legal threats to muzzle opponents on TV and new media disrupting Washington. How will these stories continue to develop over the next 3 years?

3 Years In: Still Figuring Out AI in the Newsroom

ChatGPT marked its three-year anniversary in November. Since its launch, as Charlie Warzel wrote in The Atlantic, we are now living in “the world ChatGPT built.” The media industry is no exception, and 2025 was a year of lawsuits as well as partnerships between publishers and AI companies. Media companies introduced new AI-driven tools and got pushback for some of them.

“Artificial intelligence is sweeping through newsrooms, transforming the way journalists around the world gather and disseminate information,” Benjamin Mullin and Katie Robertson wrote for The New York Times.

Here are just a handful of 2025’s big AI/media stories:

• The Tow Center for Digital Journalism introduced a new tracker for developments between news publishers and AI companies—including lawsuits, deals and grants.
• Deals
  • Through a new deal announced in January, OpenAI funded Axios’ expansion into four U.S. cities.
  • A deal between OpenAI and The Washington Post allows ChatGPT to display summaries, quotes and links to original reporting from The Post in response to relevant questions.
  • French newspaper Le Monde signed a deal with Perplexity to allow Perplexity.ai users to source answers in Le Monde’s editorial content.
  • Perplexity launched the Comet Plus subscription with several publishing partners. The plan gives subscribers access to the publishers’ paywalled sites and content, and lets the AI assistant form answers based on the content.
  • New agreements with publishers including USA Today, People Inc., CNN and Fox News allow Meta to access the partners’ content to provide real-time answers to user queries in its Meta AI chatbot.
  • A new pilot program from Google is generating AI-powered article overviews on participating publications’ Google News pages. Der Spiegel, The Guardian, The Washington Examiner and The Washington Post are early partners.
• Lawsuits
  • Thomson Reuters won the first major AI copyright case in the United States when a judge ruled that the company’s copyright was infringed by legal AI startup Ross Intelligence.
  • The Atlantic, Politico, Vox and other major publishers sued Canadian AI startup Cohere for copyright and trademark infringement.
  • In March, a federal judge rejected OpenAI’s request to toss out a copyright lawsuit from The New York Times.
  • Reddit filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, alleging that the AI company has been using its data for years without permission.
• AI-Generated Reporting
  • Quartz upped its AI-generated article production in January.
  • Italian newspaper Il Foglio said it was the first in the world to publish an edition entirely produced by artificial intelligence.
  • Several of the 2025 Pulitzer award winners disclosed using AI in their reporting.
  • The Wikimedia Foundation paused an experiment that showed users AI-generated article summaries after an overwhelmingly negative reaction from the Wikipedia editors community.
  • Wired and Business Insider removed news features written by a freelance journalist after concerns surfaced that they were likely generated by AI.
• Journalist Protections
  • ABC News‘ unionized writers secured new protections governing the use of generative AI in the workplace.
  • In May, Politico’s newsroom union alleged that the AI provisions in their contract had been violated. In December, it was determined that Politico indeed violated the collective bargaining agreement.
• Research
  • A BBC study found that leading AI assistants “create distortions, factual inaccuracies and misleading content in response to questions about news and current affairs.”
  • Quarterly analysis from Tollbit found that “generative AI chat bots are not providing anywhere near the amount of traffic as traditional search.”
  • A test by CJR found that AI search results had a common issue of citing the wrong sources (even making up sources in several instances).
  • Nearly half of Americans don’t want news from generative AI, according to a study from Poynter and the University of Minnesota.
  • Pew Research Center data found that “roughly half of U.S. adults say that AI will have a very (24%) or somewhat (26%) negative impact on the news people get in the U.S. over the next 20 years.”
• Newsroom Tools
  • In February 2025, The New York Times opened up AI training to the newsroom and debuted a new internal AI tool called Echo, an in-house beta summarization tool.
  • The Los Angeles Times announced that its opinion pieces would be published with a rating of their political content and a list of alternative political views on that issue, both AI-generated.
  • Bloomberg’s launch of AI-generated article summaries did not start off strong; the outlet issued dozens of corrections.
  • To encourage more employees to use ChatGPT, Business Insider tracked employee usage and named its “power users” in an all-hands meeting. Its book recommendations did not go well.
  • Reuters launched AI-voiced packaged video content in Spanish and Portuguese to give Reuters News Agency customers more options when selecting content that will best resonate with audiences.

Despite the explosive growth of AI over the past three years, data shows that the amounts of AI-generated writing and content written by humans online are now roughly equal. The bottom line? According to Axios, “For now, humans still want to read content that is written mostly by humans.”

Media Cuts

I’ve been writing this annual media news recap for the past few years, and each time, it’s been necessary to round up bleak headlines of newsroom cuts. Consolidations, shifts to digital and other changes continued in 2025, resulting in a number of job losses across the industry.

Among last year’s big headlines:

• The Washington Post started off a rocky year by cutting 4% of its staff.
• In March, E.W. Scripps laid off staff at multiple local news stations.
• Dotdash Meredith cut 143 positions, affecting multiple offices.
• The Columbus Messenger went out of business after 50+ years.
• Sirius XM eliminated 100 positions as part of a corporate restructuring.
• The Boulder (Colorado) Weekly, an alternative publication founded in 1975, laid off its entire newsroom staff over the summer.
• More than 40 newsroom employees at the Los Angeles Times took a buyout offered at the beginning of the year, resulting in a “tremendous amount of institutional knowledge lost.” More layoffs were announced a month later, in March, and again in May.
• Ahead of its merger with Skydance Media, Paramount cut 3% of its U.S. staff, or several hundred employees. Post-merger, employees braced for deep cuts impacting thousands of staffers. The mass layoffs were announced soon after.
• Axios cut 19 roles from its tech, product and design teams.

This is only a small fraction of the layoff headlines we tracked throughout the year. Press Gazette has a breakdown of U.S. and UK journalist cuts for 2025.

Through October 2025, the media industry announced nearly 17,000 layoffs for the year, up 26% from those announced in the first ten months of 2024, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The data also tracks cuts to News, specifically, which includes broadcast, digital, and print. That subset announced 2,075 job cuts through October 2025, which was actually down 41% from the 3,520 cuts announced during the same period in 2024.

Here’s hoping that the downward trend continues for 2026.

ICYMI: Other Major Headlines from 2025

Our team tracked hundreds of media stories each month in 2025, which we recapped in our monthly roundups. Here are some of the other headlines that stuck with us. Did you forget about any of these?

• Bad vibes: Data released from Pew Research Center in October found that 42% of Americans say the news they get makes them feel angry, while 38% said it makes them feel sad often or extremely often. Only 7% say it makes them feel happy often or extremely often.
• Best accidental scoop of the year: Trump aides inadvertently invited an editor for The Atlantic to a Signal chat where highly sensitive information about a military strike was shared. #SignalGate quickly became the top news story of the year globally, as of March 2025.
• A union wins, but the newspaper shuts down: Striking Pittsburgh Post-Gazette journalists returned to work in November after winning all their 2022 strike demands. Sadly, owners announced this week that the operations are “no longer sustainable,” and the paper will publish its last edition in May.
• Big shoes to fill: American Vogue announced that after 37 years at the helm, Anna Wintour would be passing the baton (kind of) to Chloe Malle. Wintour remains the company’s chief content officer and is Malle’s direct supervisor.
• “A new chapter for podcasting”: Through a new deal with Spotify, Netflix plans to show video versions of 16 popular podcasts, including true crime show “Serial Killers” and movie-lover favorite “The Rewatchables.” Even more video podcasts were added to the 2026 slate through another deal with iHeartMedia, announced in December.
• Mass exodus: The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post had a rough year as several high-profile, long-time staffers left the paper. The low morale continued at the end of the year as staff braced for layoffs and the paper dealt with blowback for error-prone AI-generated podcasts.
• Art for public media: Three Bob Ross paintings sold at auction for over $600,000 as part of a campaign to help U.S. public broadcasters weather federal funding cuts.
• Words of the year: The big dictionaries came out with their words of the year, including rage bait (Oxford), slop (Merriam-Webster), 67 (Dictionary.com) and parasocial (Cambridge).

Looking Ahead

What do media experts see coming in 2026? Here are a few predictions:

• The year journalism fights back: “May 2026 be the year that we send a message that horrifically false attacks on journalists and journalism will not go unanswered.” — Phil Williams, chief investigative reporter for WTVF-NewsChannel 5 in Nashville.
• Agentic journalism: “In 2026, a new type of journalism will emerge…This journalism will not be directed at people, but rather at chatbots and AI information summarizers.” — Daniel Trielli, assistant professor of media and democracy at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
• The joy of news avoidance: “Rather than focusing on negative emotions that push people away from news (which, for the record, do matter), I want to call attention to the positive emotions that stepping away from news can bring. Yes, the good feelings that come from notkeeping up.” — Stephanie Edgerly, professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications.

Read all the digital media predictions for 2026 shared with NiemanLab, one of our favorite articles to read every year. Other predictions are available from the Reuters Institute and Press Gazette. What do you think is coming this year?

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