Tension exists between news organizations and technology companies over various ways news content is used in relation to revenue generated, transparency of algorithmic selections and more. At the same time, technology is intertwined with news reporting, consumption and discovery today. We sought to explore journalists’ relationship with technology and their sense of its impact on the future of journalism.

First, respondents made it abundantly clear that digital technology plays a major role in their work. More than 80% say that digital technology is very important for the three tasks that we asked about: reaching audiences (95%), information gathering (90%) and communicating with sources (83%), and nearly everyone else says it is somewhat important. 

Respondents also generally feel positive about technology’s long-term impact on their ability to inform the public, including AI and social media. The positivity around AI is not as universally felt compared with other technologies, especially from respondents in the Global North. 

One-in-three respondents say their organization is using AI on their own content, and more than half are using technology for other tasks such as translating languages, summarizing or analyzing documents, improving their writing, checking accuracy and searching archives. 

Compared with most other issues we asked about, technology is not getting much attention in newsrooms — and journalists say they want to see more.

In newsrooms, technology is getting relatively little attention; for journalists, AI is top of mind

Among the seven issues asked about, two were tied directly to technology: AI in journalism and relationships with technology companies. Both fall in the bottom half for attention received in newsrooms, with journalists reporting slightly more attention being paid to AI than to technology company relationships. Just over half (55%) say AI is getting at least a fair amount of attention versus 48% for tech company relationships, comparable to online abuse. These issues fall behind audience engagement, revenue streams, misinformation and relationships with the government.

The amount of attention paid to technology was largely consistent across the two regions, although slightly more journalists in the Global North say their organizations were paying at least a fair amount of attention to AI.

A strong majority of journalists (across the two regions surveyed) want their organization to pay at least as much — if not more — attention to AI. They feel the same way about both potential benefits and potential harms. (We did not ask the same question for relationships with technology companies but cover additional views about technology below.) 

The desire for newsrooms to pay more attention to AI aligns very closely with what journalists say is top of mind when it comes to technology. In an open-ended question about what technology was most on their minds, there is a clear consensus: artificial intelligence. Nearly three-quarters of all responses (74%) include AI. The second most common response, social media and platforms, trails far behind at 14%, with consistency across regions. 

AI is top of mind for journalists who took our survey

Note: Some people mentioned multiple technologies, so percentages may not add up to 100.

Some respondents elaborated, offering specific concern or excitement about these technologies: "Artificial Intelligence, its role in journalism, and its impact on how we can report the news. On the flip side, how does the use of AI cast doubt on journalism, fabricate news, and otherwise spread misinformation." Many more responses were extremely brief and straightforward, simply naming one or more technologies. In fact, the most common response was two characters long: AI.¹

Journalists are generally positive about technology’s impact on their ability to inform; More hesitation about AI

Technology being top of mind does not necessarily mean respondents have a negative outlook. These journalists are generally positive about technology’s longer term impact on their work. About seven-in-ten (69%) say that developments in technology will have a positive effect on their ability to deliver journalism to the public; only 7% say the effect will be negative. When asked in more specific terms, respondents are about equally positive about social media (64%) as about technology overall, while they are much more mixed in their appraisal of AI (36% positive).

Overall, journalists are more positive than negative in their opinions about AI’s impact on an informed public (36% versus 21%, respectively), with 38% who feel the impact would be neutral. 

The large number of neutral responses may point to a sense of mixed positive and negative effects that in the end balance each other out or indicate skepticism that AI will have meaningful effects at all. But we make this comparison with caution, because the first two questions focused on journalists’ work, while the AI question focused on the public’s level of information: This question may also speak to journalists’ greater trust in their own professional community’s ability to take advantage of new technologies, compared with the public. In fact, one recent study of journalists’ attitudes towards AI found that many journalists see AI as simultaneously improving their own work and worsening both the journalism industry and the larger information ecosystem.

Journalists in the Global South are more optimistic about technology than their colleagues in the Global North

Large regional differences emerge across all three questions, with much more positivity in the Global South. Journalists in Mexico stand out as considerably less positive than others in the Global South, although they remain more positive than journalists in the Global North. 

Journalists in the Global South are also much more positive about social media (75%) than journalists in the Global North (44%), and these findings are consistent across countries within both regions.

The differences in terms of AI are even more striking. In the Global North, negative attitudes outweigh positive attitudes almost three-to-one, while in the South, five times as many journalists feel positive compared with those who feel negative. Nigeria is the most positive country in this regard: 62% of these journalists think AI will have a positive effect, outpacing the rest of the Global South by 17 percentage points.

The socio-political context that a journalist operates under could influence their sentiments about technologies. Journalists working in areas with relatively few resources tend to express more excitement about new tools, which is consistent with other global research about trust in AI. For example, a 2023 study found that people in emerging economies² are more likely to believe the benefits of AI adoption outweigh the risks, although they see the same risks as people elsewhere. And a 2025 report found that about three-quarters of journalists in the Global South were already using AI for journalism, although roughly half expressed ethical concerns. 

Technology is already deeply embedded in journalists’ work

In seeking to understand technology's role in journalism it can also be useful to get a sense of the arrays of ways technology is — or is not — currently utilized.

Journalists report using technology for a range of tasks, including many where AI is increasingly gaining a foothold. Across our respondent pool, roughly half of journalists or more say they used technology for all but two tasks: to edit an image and to develop story drafts. 

Of course, technology encompasses a wide range of tools and uses, some of which involve AI and others that do not. For example, a journalist who says they use technology for translation might be using machine translation tools to make sense of documents that would otherwise be wholly incomprehensible to them. Or, they might be using an online dictionary or a two-column document in a word processor to manually translate between languages they know well. These involve different levels of automation and also — possibly — comfort and facility with it.

Journalists in the Global South use technology more than their colleagues in the Global North

Journalists in the Global South report higher use of technology for most use cases. There are meaningful differences for all uses except translation, archive searches and image editing. The most striking difference was in determining how to best present a news story to the public: about a quarter (27%) of journalists in the Global North say that their organizations did this, compared with more than twice as many (61%) journalists in the Global South.

Global South journalists' higher reported use is consistent with their more positive assessment of technologies. Many journalists and news organizations in the Global South are deeply under-resourced, and they have strong incentives to take advantage of technology to save time and make work more efficient — they want to take advantage of all available resources to do their jobs.³ 

About one-in-three journalists (35%) say that their news organization had used AI tools to build their own internal AI systems (or models), based on their specific content rather than using a more general commercial model.

Some journalists are also already experiencing negative consequences of widespread AI adoption: 15% of journalists surveyed say that in the past year they had learned about someone using technology to reproduce their image, and 10% said they had learned about someone using technology to reproduce their voice. All in all, 17% experienced at least one of these types of impersonation.

Journalists use multiple social media apps to do their work

We also asked which social media apps our respondents were predominately using to conduct journalistic work, and allowed them to select up to four options. Three-quarters (78%) of people who selected at least one option⁴ selected four options.

Three-quarters of respondents who selected at least one option selected the maximum number of social media apps allowed

Note: Most of the respondents who selected zero options did not see this question.

Facebook was the most popular app used, with 68% of people selecting it as one of their top four apps; Twitter/X was the second most popular with 64%, then WhatsApp with 59%, Instagram with 45%, Youtube with 43% and Linkedin with 37%. Between 5% and 15% of journalists used Reddit, Signal, Telegram or TikTok most often, and less than 5% used Discord, Snapchat, Threads, Twitch or WeChat.

More than half of respondents use Facebook, Twitter/X, and WhatsApp

We also saw some noticeable regional differences. Facebook and WhatsApp, in particular, are much more popular in the Global South than the Global North. The United States is an outlier in its low use of WhatsApp: 11% of U.S. respondents list WhatsApp as one of their top apps, whereas 43% of respondents in the rest of the Global North do. On a global scale, WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app; nearly everyone uses the app in Brazil, India and many other countries. On the other hand, LinkedIn is more popular with journalists in the Global North than the Global South. 

Journalists are mostly positive about how technology uses are communicated

One key issue related to the increased use of technology and machine learning in journalism production is the practice of disclosure: when and how should the public be informed about automation in the writing, editing or production of articles and other publications?

Leaders within and beyond the news industry have been considering various approaches and standards specifically when it comes to AI; but the question of disclosure is broader, especially as technology continues to advance: it is ultimately about the balance of human labor and technology or machine involvement in the content the public receives.

Journalists offer mixed reviews about how well their organization communicates with the public about the various ways technology is used in the reporting process. They are overall more positive than negative, but not emphatically so. Of the 55% who express a generally positive sense, the largest portion, 39%, say their organizations were doing a fairly good job with less than half as many, 16%, calling the job “very good.” On the other end of the spectrum, 39% feel their organization was doing either not so good (29%) or not at all good (10%) of a job. This finding is generally consistent across regions, although journalists in the Global South are a bit more likely to say “very good.” These findings are also broadly consistent with their feelings about how well the value of journalism is communicated.

When it comes to specific ways that journalists say they themselves used technology, most say that their organization does communicate that use to their audiences.⁵

Just as more journalists in the Global South report using technology for each of these purposes, far more journalists in the Global South say that their organizations disclose each of these uses (except for developing story drafts, which was not meaningfully different). 

1. Or IA or KI, depending on the language of the response. ↩︎
2. We use the terminology selected by the reports we cite; in this case, “emerging economies” and “the Global South” largely refer to the same countries. ↩︎
3. The responses may also reflect social norms: given their overall assessment of technology, journalists in the Global North may under-report their use of technology, while those in the Global South may over-report it. It's also possible that journalists in the Global South have more expansive definitions of "technology." Furthermore, there is known variability in survey responses across countries regarding social desirability and acquiescence. ↩︎
4. While 80 people did not select any of these apps, most of those respondents did not see this question. See Methodology for details. ↩︎
5. The number of people ranges from 134 who used technology "to develop story drafts" to 230 who used technology "to translate content from one language to another." ↩︎