You may have seen a few studies in recent weeks suggesting news brands face more trouble ahead because of AI-generated overviews in search and Google’s AI Mode.

For example, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism found chatbots were generally bad at declining to answer questions they couldn’t answer accurately, offering incorrect or speculative answers instead, and that many were accessing content on sites that had blocked them.

They also saw generative search tools make up links and content licensing deals with news sources providing no guarantee of accurate citation in chatbot responses.

Trying to understand where your news brand is being featured in AI overviews? 

You can reasonably expect 70% of the pages ranking in overviews to change over two or three months, suggesting the results are volatile, another study showed. What’s more, 80% of consumers now rely on AI-written results for at least 40% of their searches, reducing organic Web traffic by 15% to 25%, according to research by Bain and Company. About 68% of LLM users rely on these platforms for researching, gathering, and summarising information, and some 48% use them to understand the latest news and weather.

And, at a time when many news brands are struggling to build sustainable digital subscriptions businesses, it turns out more than one-fifth of young Americans are willing to pay for an AI subscription.

Yet, there seems to be another, more positive trend many media industry observers are independently picking up on and which news publishers can easily capitalise on: the resilience of video.

“Video remains notably resistant to AI disruption, primarily because audiences deeply value authentic human experiences and genuine storytelling,” wrote analyst Scott Purcell. “Despite rapid advances in technologies like OpenAI’s Sora, people continue to gravitate toward content where real individuals share relatable experiences, emotions, and insights — qualities AI struggles to convincingly replicate.”

Similarly, Future Today Strategy Group’s Sam Guzik envisions a future where the Internet is overrun with low-quality AI-generated media. “Even as search engines and digital assistants try to sift through the vast volumes of content generated every day, consumers spend less time browsing because it is unpleasant — if not impossible — to find what they’re looking for.”

In this era, broadcast content is perceived as more reliable for two reasons, he says: 

“First, the cost of broadcasting establishes a significant barrier to entry, making it economically infeasible for low-value publishers to distribute content that way. Second, on-device AI models constantly curate broadcast data, creating a personalised stream of news and information that is easier for consumers to manage.”

As the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism pointed out in its annual digital news report, video is becoming a more important source of online news, especially with younger audiences: “Short news videos are accessed by two-thirds of our sample each week, with longer formats attracting around half.”

And yet: “The main locus of news video consumption is online platforms (72%) rather than publisher Web sites (22%), increasing the challenges around monetisation and connection,” the report added.

How are different news brands mitigating the threat from GenAI with video? Here are some examples:

• News Corp Australia is experimenting with vertical, mobile-first video.

• Mediacorp in Singapore has built an automated clipping tool and is working on multimodal retrieval augmented generation.

• Germany’s Der Spiegel has launched an audio and video podcast for young people, particularly news avoiders.

• The Washington Post uses humour to draw younger viewers to news on TikTok.

• Britain’s Future Plc uses GenAI to edit video for different distribution channels.

• The Hindu in India feeds a video into an AI application, which chunks it into chapters and creates time stamps for social media.

• This blog post outlines a GenAI workflow for converting long-form content to compelling short-form videos.

• Singapore’s Straits Times created new video features to reach and engage its audience more effectively.

• Sweden’s Expressen uses data to ensure its TikTok offering feels relevant to young viewers.

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