Five media and tech trends for 2025

January abounds with predictions. But forecasts tend to fit into one of two categories: outlandish and unlikely (“AI will eliminate 50% of jobs”) or obvious and pointless (“Businesses will grapple with geopolitical uncertainty”).

Instead, I thought I’d start the year with five trends that I expect to be important for those of us who ply our trades in the worlds of media, communications and tech. Admittedly, there are some micro predictions here. But nothing akin to, say, The Rest is Politics’ Rory Stewart forecasting that Kamala Harris would win the US presidential election “comfortably”.

The primary focus is the UK, though I expect some US trends mentioned to cross over in time. And there's plenty more going on that isn't here - some of which I hope to touch on throughout the year.

1. The UK media’s ‘middle’ will continue to be squeezed

The UK media landscape has broadly fallen into three categories. First, there’s the BBC and its eco-system. The Beeb and the ￡3.7bn-ish it generates from the licence fee each year consistently come under attack from critics, particularly Conservative MPs and newspapers. Yet, with Labour in power until at least 2029, it should enjoy a less hostile operating environment.

Second are those media titles that appear to be succeeding in transitioning to a subscription-based model. In the UK, the likes of The Economist, the Telegraph and The Times and Sunday Times have, to varying degrees, made a fist of this and managed to persuade affluent consumers to pay for high-quality news. They will continue to invest in their offer to maintain this, with some also managing to monetise podcasts.

Yet it’s the media in the third category that face the existential threat. These are news brands and other platforms that give their content away free and aim to derive a large chunk of their income from advertising. Those revenues have been shrinking fast with the online ad market now controlled by large US tech firms. Unfortunately, things aren’t going to get better and we can expect more media titles that offer churny, generic content for free to be financially challenged. Like in recent years, some will be forced to shut down.

2. The rise of premium and super-premium news brands

The UK is faring well with premium news brands that serve well-off audiences. Alongside The Economist, the Financial Times is prospering by selling subscriptions to knowledge workers (think lawyers, accountants and management consultants) who want to be across macro trends and sound smart in their jobs. US brands like Bloomberg and Vox are excelling too.

An emerging trend to watch is those serving a super-premium audience: CEOs. Semafor, the American title co-founded by former BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith, has just poached Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson from the FT to produce an elite newsletter aimed specifically at the world’s top bosses. Semafor is also planning uber-exclusive events at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Expect other titles to follow suit.

It isn’t just media titles in this space, though. Busy head-honchos love podcasts as well as newsletters and respected business brands are responding with their own content. In Goldman Sachs Exchanges, the investment bank invites leaders to “break down the key issues shaping the global economy”. KPMG, meanwhile, has launched Pull Up a Chair with Bina Mehta, hosted by its UK chair.

And the premium boom isn't confined to just national and international titles. Journalist and entrepreneur Joshi Herrmann launched The Mill - a subscription-based, long read-focused news outlet - in Manchester in 2020 and has since expanded it into other major UK cities. Its focus on quality over quantity is no real substitute for legacy local papers, which aimed to ensure readers knew everything that was going on in their community with reporters marking magistrates and crown courts and town halls. Yet The Mill's success has nevertheless restored some people's faith in regional media.

3. News influencers increasing their reach and power

One trend of recent years in the news landscape has been journalists breaking free of the traditional model - being paid by a newspaper or broadcaster to produce stories and features - to set up on their own. A key enabler of this has been Substack, the newsletter platform. Former Telegraph, Guardian and Times journalist Graham Ruddick is among the UK hacks who have taken this route, launching Off To Lunch, his business digest, in 2022 (he later sold it to Business Leader). Other journalists who swapped traditional media for Substack include former Times football writer Henry Winter and Will Hayward, who left Reach's Wales Online.

The sheer variety of platforms - like newsletters and podcasts as well as YouTube and X - available to journalists and news influencers, along with the low barriers to entry, means this trend is being supercharged. In the US, where so many things begin, veteran Silicon Valley journalist Kara Swisher and former CNN anchor Dom Lemon are among those succeeding without being tethered to ‘legacy’ media. Swisher hosts a clutch of podcasts that earn her a fortune and Lemon’s YouTube channel has almost 320,000 subscribers.

The UK news media environment is not as incendiary as the less heavily regulated US. Nevertheless, more journalists here, particularly those that specialise in the written word, are likely to break free from traditional media and go it alone.

4. More power to Big Tech - and one platform in particular

Trend 3 is further evidence of the awesome power of Big Tech, which is increasing its stranglehold on our lives. And the king of these when it comes to media content is YouTube.

Fancy yourself as a news influencer offering video hot-takes on what’s shaping our world? You’ll want to be on YouTube. What about focusing on audio by launching a podcast? You’ll probably still want to film it and have it on YouTube, which is now, amazingly, America’s top platform for podcasts, ahead of Spotify and Apple. The video-sharing site has over 2bn users. TikTok has almost as many. Even X, which Elon Musk has made a good fist of ruining since he bought it in 2022, has over 500m users, according to estimates.

Being widely seen or heard means using at least one of these platforms. That also entails being at the mercy of their ever-changing algorithms that upweight and downweight different types of content. That dynamic isn’t changing anytime soon.

5. Social media: hand-wringing but not much action

Finally, social media more generally. With notable exceptions - LinkedIn being one and potentially also now Bluesky - social media platforms risk becoming net-negative for society (and some may say they already are). That’s a result of direct and indirect links to hate speech, misinformation and disinformation, and a negative impact on users’ mental health, among other things.

Responding to this grim reality, Australia’s government banned under-16s from social media in a law passed at the end of last year. Other countries appear to be watching (the UK’s technology secretary, Peter Kyle, has said a similar ban is “on the table”). But they haven’t yet followed suit. And while Britain’s Online Safety Act - which threatens action against social media companies if they fail to keep children safe online - is a good start, many critics say it doesn’t go far enough.

Expect, then, another year of hand-wringing about the harms of social media, but little in the way of firm action. And watch as media and brands make their own calls about which platforms they’re happy to be associated with and which are causing them and society more harm than good.

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