Sky News executive chairman David Rhodes and Observer digital editor Basia Cummings both spoke about the benefits of having personalities as part of a newsbrand at the launch of the Reuters Digital News Report 2025.
The report highlighted a “shift to personality-led news creators” who are benefitting from the rise in people getting news content from social video. In the US, social and video networks rose above TV as a news source for the first time this year.
[Read more: News trends for 2025: AI chatbots, social video boom, platform fragmentation and rise of news influencers]
The report also noted that “advances in AI come at a time when human connection seems more important than ever, in terms of other trends highlighted in this report such as personality-led news.
“The task for publishers is how to adjust to these new realities, to embrace technology where it makes sense while keeping humans in the loop – and to make the news more engaging and personal without losing sight of the values that attract people to their brands in the first place.”
Rhodes was asked by Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism director Mitali Mukherjee if there is an opportunity or potential partnerships to explore through the growth of news personalities.
He responded: “There’s a reality here, which is that the individual that’s presenting you the story, whether we want to call them personality, presenter, a reporter, correspondent, an influencer, talent, some of those words have a pejorative meaning around the newsroom. Some of those words don’t. All of them kind of describe the same person in different settings.”
He said the takeaway at Sky News from the Reuters Institute research is what it means for trust, noting that when he got into the industry “trust was largely held by big institutional brands and conferred by those brands onto the individuals representing them. And that has flipped 180 degrees.
“Trust is largely given or lent to individual reporters, and they have the ability to sort of confer that on us as an institutional brand day to day, or at least that’s the pattern that we see, and that’s part of what we’re building our future plan around,” he said, referring to the Sky News 2030 plan which will start asking audiences to pay for some of its content.
Asked if this means Sky News is actively looking to engage with talent, Rhodes added that the audience response to the likes of political journalists Beth Rigby, Sam Coates, Sophy Ridge and Trevor Phillips “ends up having a halo effect on us… it’s obviously a two-way street, but I think it’s much more that direction than it was a generation ago”.
Basia Cummings, digital editor of The Observer since its takeover by Tortoise Media in April, shared a similar viewpoint: “The amazing thing about The Observer is it is just jam-packed with people that readers love,” she said, referring to writers like Nigel Slater and Eva Wiseman.
“A big part of what we’re doing over the next year is building their own platforms around them. Of course they have their own followings on social media, but exactly as David’s saying, it’s about utilising them to bring new people to The Observer.
“We need to find that next generation of Observer voices and that’s what we’ve spent a lot of the last few months doing, bringing new reporters, new commentators into our orbit.”
Cummings also revealed that print sales of The Observer have been “steady” since the Tortoise acquisition.
Paying for news by going beyond news
The panel also discussed the difficulty in getting people to pay for news, as highlighted by the report. The proportion of people paying for online news across a basket of 20 richer markets has remained stable on 18% – although just 10% in the UK.
Reuters launched a metered paywall on its consumer website (separate to its news agency provision) in October costing £1, $1 or €1 per week. It has so far only launched in certain countries, with a global rollout ongoing.
Jane Barrett, head of AI strategy at Reuters, told the panel the subscriptions have been “growing steadily” but noted the concerns in the report about willingness to pay. For example, 71% of non-payers in the US say they would not be interested in a variety of options around paying for a day or a week, or for a bundle with non-news services.
Barrett said this was why Reuters has kept the price low and consistent. “It’s been set low because we want to keep access to the news available for all people,” although she noted it is still more than many people might be willing to pay.
There are other benefits than the direct subscription revenue, however: “It also allows us to know our audience much better, to be able to do product development much better,” Barrett said, “because we actually are understanding how those subscribers are using the news, how they’re navigating, how we can help them navigate better…
“It’s not going to be the majority of our revenue but it’s giving us so much valuable information.”
The Observer has shared a target of reaching 100,000 digital subscribers although it is currently free to access until the autumn as a subscriber app and new website is built.
“It’s not great news when you look at the slides [with findings from the report],” Cummings said, “but I think when you think about what a newsroom can provide in an expanded sense – for example at The New York Times cooking and puzzles are a huge part of their subscription business.
“Newspapers traditionally provided utility. You could see the TV listings, you could get the stocks and shares, you could get the weather, utility is a really important thing that you can now get in so many places and newsrooms and particularly us at The Observer have to think about what are the other forms of utility beyond news that a newsroom can offer that feels different, that feels meaningful, that still speaks to all the things that we know is important around transparency and personality-driven offerings and looking at the platforms and where people are.
“So I think it might be that people don’t want to pay for news, but they do want to pay for an organisation that might be providing them with lots of different ways in when news becomes a part of it, but not the entire point of the subscription.”
Meanwhile Rhodes noted that although people express their unwillingness to pay for news in reports like this, they pay for it in many ways indirectly such as through consuming advertising, puzzles, TV carriage fees or the BBC licence fee.
“Most people are paying for something. Most people don’t want to pay. But that’s true of everything,” he said.
“So in that environment, how we will show up with a paid premium offering is in a variety of ways. There are going to be certain products we provide that we think people will pay for very directly. There’ll be others where, if we’ve managed to achieve a certain number of subscribers, for instance to a newsletter and that’s an interesting, addressable audience, we can sell other things.
“I think this whole question of payments and who pays how is much more complex and nuanced than just who’s going to actually fork over cash for because, by the way, if you ask many of us, and we’re in this business, I think we’d like to see those numbers be higher, but it’s not our own behaviour. If we can get something without paying for it directly, we prefer that option.”
Rhodes also spoke about Sky News moving away from targeting the maximum possible video views towards monetisable views specifically as he delved into the text to video shift.
The report showed text is more resilient than many might think – especially in the UK. Globally 55% of people still prefer text when consuming online news (with 31% preferring to watch and 15% who like to listen). In the UK that rises to 73% preferring text (16% video, 11% audio).
Rhodes said that although text is “remains a very resilient format” in the UK, Sky News wants to be a “video-first” organisation.
He said this is partly due to its heritage as a TV broadcaster but that it is “partly in the technology context of AI, which enters into the report, obviously, is that we feel we can be the design partner for how these technologies help audiences discover news video.
“And, frankly, we think that the trend away from keyword search and search engine optimisation and the ability of chatbots to replicate a lot of digital text means that video is really a more resilient format.”
‘Not necessarily bad outcomes’ from shift in accessing news through AI
On AI, Rhodes said discussions in the industry have been largely around “newsroom tools for how journalism reaches audiences, versus where we want to position ourselves, which is mostly thinking about where our journalism ends up in the wild and how it’s compensated, and so we’re very focused on attribution models…”
Sky News was one of several publishers to do a content deal with Prorata.ai last year (more than 500 publications are now represented through partnerships with the start-up). Prorata has an algorithm to compensate publishers proportionally when their content is used to help generate AI answers.
“So this is why we come out, and will continue to come out strongly for, retrieval augmented generation or RAG models – imperfect and being developed, but absolutely critically important to determining journalistic outcomes in this new place, which, by the way, we’re optimistic about.
“I mean, it is the case that keyword search and search engine optimisation are going down. How fast they’re going down, and how long that tail is, I think has some regional characteristics. And what it can be replaced by generative engine optimisation, retrieval augmented generation, a whole host of other acronyms, is really critically important and actually could lead to fewer stories told better, more context, identifying audiences that are willing to pay for quality journalism. Those are not necessarily bad outcomes…”
But Barrett at Reuters said she is more concerned now about the impact of AI on entry-level jobs in journalism than she was a year ago. “I see it as a greater threat now,” she said.
“but I do think that again, when I speak to the young journalists around Reuters, they are very often the ones who are playing the most with AI tools. They’re the ones who are seeing themselves as partners with AI to do journalism. They are working out how to use the models and the techniques, they’re training themselves…
“That’s kind of what we need. We need those plastic minds that really care about core journalism and why we’re doing journalism, and then bring a huge amount of wit, intelligence, open mindedness, experimenting.”
Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our "Letters Page" blog
