By Mrs. Evi Varsou, Director of Media & Content Solutions, Athens Technology Center (ATC)
The media sector today stands at a crossroads. On one side, it continues to be the foundation of democratic accountability, keeping citizens informed and institutions transparent. On the other, it faces pressures unlike anything experienced before: the relentless speed of digital information flows, the spread of disinformation, and the constant demand for cross-channel publishing. In this environment, we do not see Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a threat to journalistic integrity. Rather, we see it as a set of capabilities which, when carefully orchestrated, can help us achieve greater precision, efficiency, and, above all, trust.
By orchestration, we mean AI that works in concert across the news lifecycle – not siloed tools, but an integrated approach. It’s the difference between a noisy cacophony of apps and a well-conducted symphony that amplifies each journalist’s effectiveness.
Innovation beyond speed: towards strategic clarity
Too often, discussions about innovation in the media reduce AI to a matter of speed. But for us, meaningful innovation is about clarity and orchestration. Journalists do not need more tools in isolation; they need systems that harmonize workflows and reduce operational noise. When AI supports summarization, metadata tagging, editorial calendar coordination, and adaptive publishing, it allows us to turn bottlenecks into opportunities.
Imagine editors starting their day with an AI-curated brief of overnight news, automatically tagged and summarized. They then use one-click AI suggestions to repurpose the lead story into a mobile-friendly piece, a radio script, and a social media post – all tone-tailored to each channel. Meanwhile, the system’s real-time dashboard flags that yesterday’s investigative article is trending on Twitter, prompting her team to issue an update.
Importantly, this is not about replacing editorial judgment. It is about ensuring that our creativity is used where it truly matters—on stories that provide context and credibility. The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025 (DNR) confirms this view.
At a strategic level, the Reuters Institute’s Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions 2025 highlights two realities that guide our roadmap at ATC: (1) the disruption of search (e.g., AI overviews and generative answers) poses an existential challenge to referral traffic and discoverability; and (2) platform uncertainty continues, pushing publishers to invest in direct relationships, product thinking, and provenance/labelling practices.
- Social traffic collapse: The Reuters Institute report quantified the social media decline: Facebook referral traffic to news sites fell by 67% from Jan 2023 to late 2024, and Twitter (X) referrals dropped by 50% in that time. This dramatic downturn underpins the “platform uncertainty” factor and why publishers are doubling down on direct channels and loyalty.
- AI disruption anxiety: Beyond noting the challenge abstractly, the Reuters survey found 74% of news leaders are worried about AI’s impact on search traffic (60% “somewhat” and 14% “extremely” concerned). This emphasizes that AI-driven search changes are not a distant threat but an immediate strategic worry for many editors and CEOs – reinforcing the article’s call for proactive innovation and new distribution strategies.
These insights reinforce why our development at ATC emphasizes interoperability, first-party data, and transparent AI usage. In practical terms, it means tackling the very real workflow inefficiencies that plague newsrooms today.
Tackling newsroom inefficiencies
Every day, we witness how fragmented workflows drain editorial teams. Journalists juggle research, writing, SEO, editing, distribution, and analytics—often across disconnected tools. This creates inefficiencies, decision fatigue, and unnecessary duplication of effort. At ATC, our answer is Newsasset PLUS, an AI-driven editorial ecosystem that streamlines the entire content lifecycle. From planning and creation to multi-channel distribution and analytics, Newsasset PLUS helps publishers and news agencies turn complexities into opportunities. Under crushing deadlines and ever-increasing content demands, editors can rely on AI to handle routine tasks – suggesting optimized headlines, extracting keywords and hashtags for SEO, auto-summarizing long reports – all while they focus on crafting quality stories. Crucially, the editor stays in control: AI offers options and insights, but human judgment has the final say in what gets published.
Independent reporting echoes these needs. According to iMEdD Lab’s overview of AI in the newsroom (2023), news organizations have integrated AI into ‘every stage of the creation process’ – from audio transcription/editing, fact‑checking support, scraping, to image generation – and 80% of newsrooms expect AI use to increase going forward.
This aligns with what we see on the field: the value is not in isolated tools, but in coordinated orchestration—exactly what Newsasset PLUS is designed to deliver (e.g., optimized headlines, automated keyword extraction, tone adaptation per channel, and real‑time performance monitoring), always with the editor in control.
In fact, we have designed newsasset PLUS AI capabilities in a way that
- each AI suggestion (whether a headline or a fact-check alert) is presented to editors for approval – the editor remains in control at every step;
- content analysis and audience trends are used to suggest SEO-optimized headlines and tags. For instance, it might recommend keywords that have high search volume or hashtags trending on social media relevant to the story’s topic;
- tone and style adaptation per channel (e.g., a more conversational tone for Twitter vs. a formal tone for print) is handled by the AI rewriting tool, guided by each organization’s editorial stylebook.
AI tools against disinformation
Efficiency alone isn’t enough if misinformation erodes audience trust. That’s why our AI efforts also focus on safeguarding truth. In fact, the challenge of disinformation is perhaps the most pressing issue for our industry.
From ATC’s involvement in European disinformation observatories, including the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), we have learned that disinformation cannot be addressed reactively; it requires systemic and scalable solutions. At ATC, we have developed AI‑enabled tools that act as stand‑alone solutions, distinct from our collaborative fact‑checking platform Truly Media. These include claim detection & matching against debunked databases, logical fallacy detection, multilingual hate‑speech classification, and a media‑literacy chatbot that doesn’t just give answers but uses a Socratic dialogue to guide users through critical-thinking steps.
This means a reader asking about a suspicious story will be led by the bot to ask the right questions and consider evidence, effectively teaching how to spot misinformation.
Automated claim matching can match claims either from articles stored in a database or by searching online within seconds, giving fact-checkers a head start. Moreover, ATC’s hate-speech classifier can scan thousands of comments , identifying toxic content far faster than manual moderation.
Furthemore, many of these AI tools (summarization, translation, even hate speech detection) support or are being extended to multiple languages.
Policy and governance analysis from the Center for News, Technology & Innovation (CNTI) underscores why we separate these capabilities: transparency alone is not enough; audiences also need context about newsroom practices, and governance must balance copyright, civil liberties, and accountability as AI permeates news production (CNTI primer). These priorities are consistent with the European Commission’s guidance on AI‑enabled verification ecosystems (Tackling Online Disinformation).
Last but not least, the DNR found more than half of people are concerned about distinguishing real vs fake news online, and most turn to trusted news brands to verify stories. So, publishers and news agencies should address the audience’s anxiety that newsrooms must address, ideally by providing verified content and transparency by exploiting AI-assisted verification and media literacy bots.
From audiences to communities
Rebuilding trust also means rethinking how we engage the public. Beyond combating falsehoods, AI can help newsrooms shift from treating people as passive audiences to active communities.
Visibility alone is no longer enough; relevance and resonance are what matter. With AI‑powered audience intelligence, we can move from reactive publishing to predictive engagement—deciding what to publish, when, and in what form. Conversational interfaces (e.g., chatbots trained on a publisher’s archive) provide readers with on‑demand access to verified content and institutional memory.
This not only drives engagement – keeping users on our platforms longer – but also offers upsell opportunities for newsletters or subscriptions whenever the chatbot surfaces premium content.
Our newsasset AI chatbot uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) – meaning it combines a large language model with our indexed knowledge base to provide grounded, context-specific answers. In practice, it retrieves facts from your content archive while it formulates a response, ensuring the answer cites real newsroom data rather than just ‘hallucinating.
Here again, Digital News Report 2025 (DNR) offers a sobering backdrop: in the week after the January 2025 U.S. inauguration, more Americans said they got news from social & video networks than from TV or news sites/apps—a first in the series; over half of under‑35s in the U.S. relied on these networks; across markets, 44% of 18–24s said social/video networks are their main source; and 15% of under‑25s used AI chatbots for news weekly (7% overall). Meanwhile, trust in news remains stable at ~40% globally (Reuters Institute, 2025). These shifts validate why publishers must double‑down on direct channels (newsletters, apps, communities) and on distinctive value that stands out in feeds (Reuters coverage of DNR 2025 highlights).
For example, a regional publisher might deploy a consumer-facing news chatbot that draws from its archive to answer reader questions – turning archival content into a living resource. This kind of on-demand, trustworthy information service can deepen engagement, especially with younger audiences accustomed to conversational interfaces.
Audience behavior shifts
The World Economic Forum’s coverage of DNR 2025 notes that in many European countries, social media as a primary news source has grown to ~20% (from under 10% a decade ago in places like the UK or France). This shows that while the U.S. leads some trends, Europe is following suit in the gradual shift to social news consumption. And that is something that EMEA publishers should take a look at: digital transition and youth audience habits are universal challenges, not just an American phenomenon.
The invisibility of successful innovation
When innovation is done right, it feels invisible. This is a principle we hold strongly to: when technology fades into the background and what stands out are sharper stories, faster workflows, and more contextual reporting, that is when innovation truly succeeds. Empirical syntheses reinforce this: a 2025 Frontiers in Communication mini‑review maps three dominant research streams—technology integration in newsrooms, shifting consumption patterns, and business‑model innovation—and calls for clearer ethical frameworks and long‑term evaluation of AI’s impact on practice (Frontiers, 2025).
AI investment as survival strategy
An insight from the 2024 Reuters Digital News Report (cited in the Frontiers review) is that 78% of surveyed editors and CEOs believe AI investment is essential for journalism’s survival. This statistic underscores the industry’s recognition that AI is not optional – it’s seen as critical to future viability. Hence, investing in AI (like the Newsasset PLUS platform) is in line with what nearly four-fifths of industry leaders deem necessary.
Conclusion
The future of journalism will not be secured by algorithms alone, but by how well we orchestrate the collaboration between human creativity and machine intelligence.
For news organizations in EMEA and beyond, embracing AI thoughtfully is becoming essential to staying relevant and resilient.
For editors and media executives, the takeaway is clear: adopting AI is no longer optional – it’s the path to reclaiming time, elevating truth, and rebuilding trust in journalism. By embedding AI into editorial infrastructures while keeping human judgment at the core, we won’t just adapt to the digital age; we will lead in it, strengthening journalism’s vital democratic mission.
Selected sources & further reading:
- Reuters Institute — Digital News Report 2025
- Reuters Institute — Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends & Predictions 2025 (PDF)
- CNTI — Artificial Intelligence in Journalism (Issue Primer)
- iMEdD Lab — The role of Artificial Intelligence in the newsroom
- Frontiers in Communication — Digital transformation in journalism: mini review on the impact of AI on journalistic practices (2025)
- World Economic Forum – How people in 2025 are getting their news
