June 2025 – The findings from our most recent Pulse, coupled with the outputs from our event looking at the future of the media – in combat with misinformation, show (and no one will drop their pint glass at reading this) that much change is afoot in a world where we all pursue the truth.
33% from our Pulse see changing consumer behaviour in terms of how people get their news as having a big influence on the future of the media. One senior leader said, ‘We are now each our own editors – and therein lies the risk.’
It is a debate as old as time: what came first; the chicken or the egg? Did the decline of print media come first or the rise of the power of social media?
One CEO posits that ‘AI and social media has stepped in to fill (the) gap and we are ‘left by a declining print media.’ Whichever viewpoint you land on, the new reality is clear: the media is a far more open field than before.
It is unsurprising, then, that 42% of respondents believe that AI, as it continues to evolve, will have the biggest impact on the future. As traditional media declines and technology charges into the breach, the playing field of the media is more open than ever before. AI ‘will inevitably have an impact’, as one CEO opined but understanding what future consumers want is another issue entirely.
Many PR & Comms leaders believe the importance and role of truth is paramount. AI and social media offers a personal approach in terms of consumption; but it is not as fact-checked or regulated as traditional media and AI cannot, as yet, measure the future.
One leader differentiated between misinformation and the deliberate nature of disinformation, that is whether ‘consumers will return to mainstream media for the truth where the news sources have been more scrupulously checked and verified’. Perhaps this is the key battleground in the future.
Changing consumer behaviours are equally inevitable as AI’s impact. Logic would suggest that the truth will always be important to consumers, but as the modern world often reminds us, logic is always not a given. Posturing with and around the truth however is.