Narrow The Focus
This essay is part of our New Year's series on what to expect in 2025, and can be downloaded as one compiled PDF for you to read at your leisure via the download form. Thank you
By Robert Nisbet, Partner at 5654 & Company
Any article considering how the media might evolve in 2025 should consider this sobering statistic: despite an attempted assassination, a last-minute change of candidate and one of the closest and most heated races in polling history, the number of people watching the US Presidential election on TV news dropped by 25% on the previous contest. And this stat mirrors broader movements in how people access news globally, away from traditional sources to online alternatives, which rarely have the same commitment to impartiality and accuracy. This trend is only going to accelerate in 2025.
This shifting reality has eroded the financial foundations on which many news brands fund their journalism. Even the most successful news titles saw year-on-year falls: the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday managed to contain their sales drop by 8%, which was viewed as a success, such is the parlous state of the industry. Sky News, which has seen ratings slide, has so far failed to secure an extension to the budget guarantee given by new owners Comcast, which is set to expire in 2028. The BBC licence fee will rise by inflation after a two-year freeze, but its news bulletins suffered a 6% ratings drop, with online sites overtaking TV news as the UK’s main source of news for the first time, according to Ofcom.
And some of these ‘new media’ brands are starting to eye up the legacy media dinosaurs. Tortoise Media’s audacious bid for The Observer – despite the upstart never having turned a profit – shows how vulnerable established titles are to precocious new media operations. This could be 2025’s biggest media story in the UK, given The Observer journalists’ furious response to the talks, voting by 93% to consider strike action if the deal were to go ahead. 2025 is likely to see a year of further consolidations, more news brands going digital-only and more newsrooms actively pursuing a digital first mindset.
Much of this will be driven by the declining impact of Facebook in linking to news titles, and the increased news importance of online apps and sites which major on images and video rather than words, such as YouTube and TikTok. This format shift could skew editorial values in 2025 towards more inspirational human stories and a basics-first approach, explaining complicated subjects to audiences where any depth of knowledge cannot be presumed. This shift is a challenge to journalism.
That’s because a dichotomy sits underneath this shift: traditional news brands are more trusted than online media sources, yet the latter is where increasingly large numbers are finding their information. That’s despite repeated surveys showing they are viewed as less accurate, trustworthy and impartial than so-called ‘mainstream media’. This builds in an inherent contradiction which journalists will have to navigate. How do they build trust in new platforms and ensure integrity is integrated in their product without the guardrails of traditional editorial processes?
For businesses looking to burnish or manage their corporate reputation through the media, ‘narrowcasting’ is growing in importance over broadcasting: carefully selecting the earned media channels your specific audiences consume, while utilising owned channels to self-publish while building and tracking support.
That’s not to say mass media should be ignored in 2025. It continues to set the agenda. But the financial pressures on publishers and broadcasters are so acute that outrage and pursuit of a confrontational editorial line are increasingly used to drive revenue. Safe harbours are a vanishing rarity – one of the many reasons old media strategies are being rebooted.