By 2050, consuming the news may involve screens that are not really screens, AI briefings delivered through humanlike interfaces or even, as one independent publisher put it, a chip implanted in the brain.
Those possibilities emerged from a wide-ranging forecast by Columbia Journalism Review, which convened senior editors, broadcasters and independent publishers to imagine what journalism might look like a quarter-century from now.
Why it matters is that the participants largely agreed on one point: the news industry is heading towards a stark divide. A small number of powerful global brands are likely to dominate at one end, while a sprawling universe of individual creators fills the other. Caught in between, today’s broadcast networks and general-interest newspapers risk being squeezed out altogether.
Despite the upheaval, there was guarded optimism about the survival of a handful of legacy print institutions. Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of Semafor, said titles such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal had reached an “altitude” that made them hard to dislodge. “Some of these brands have actually proven more enduring than anybody expected,” he said, pointing to Newsweek as a publication that has survived in what he described as a “slightly zombified form.”
Emma Tucker, editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal, agreed, predicting a winner-takes-all future in which most markets sustain only one or two dominant outlets. Survival, she argued, would depend on a deeper relationship with readers. “In the future, it won’t be enough to just report something,” she said. “You’ll have to be an expert in your field, and also build connections.”
If print’s giants may endure, the outlook for television news was bleak. Smith questioned whether the traditional network brand could survive in a video ecosystem driven by individual personalities. Kara Swisher, host of On with Kara Swisher, was blunt. “The broadcast networks will be gone,” she said.
Don Lemon, the former CNN anchor now publishing independently on YouTube, argued that legacy organisations were underestimating the speed of decline. “Legacy media aren’t as sober as they should be about the decline,” he said, predicting that parent companies would eventually tire of subsidising news divisions and shut them down. Independent, personality-led journalism, he suggested, would fill the gap.
Artificial intelligence dominated the discussion, though opinions diverged sharply. Taylor Lorenz, founder of User Mag, predicted that legacy media structures would be swept aside by personalised AI systems. While demand for information would remain, she said, many existing companies were “not set up to survive”.
Others foresaw a backlash that would reassert the value of human reporting. Patricia Campos Mello of Folha de São Paulo warned of the risks of low-quality AI output, citing a recent example in which a system advised users to use glue to keep cheese on a pizza. “If you have low-quality information, you’re going to be eating pizza with glue,” she said, arguing that rigorous journalism would remain essential both for audiences and for training AI systems.
Katie Drummond, global editorial director at Wired, predicted a renewed appetite for human-led work. Audiences, she said, would eventually tire of automated content flooding the internet and seek out reporting with judgment and voice.
The conversation also turned to money and regulation. Esther Wang, co-founder of the worker-owned outlet Hell Gate, said she hoped the hollowing out of local news by private equity would be reversed through public funding. Alissa Quart of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project imagined future rules that would treat disinformation more like a public health risk, with warnings attached to AI-generated material.
For many participants, the defining question was whether journalism could retain a sense of purpose. David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, predicted that today’s dominant social platforms would disappear but argued that publications with a clear mission would endure. “The critical thing is to maintain your values,” he said, insisting that fairness, accuracy and depth would outlast any technological shift.
Moussa Ngom of the Senegalese network La Maison des Reporters drew a similar line, arguing that automation would eliminate routine tasks but not the journalist’s personal touch.
The forecasts ranged from holographic bundles to neural implants, but the underlying message was consistent. Passive consumption of generic news is fading. By 2050, journalism will either be personal and trusted or it will struggle to exist at all.
