Newsrooms Deploy Gen AI for Efficiency, Not Revenue — Half Use Unsanctioned Tools

The study signals that newsroom GenAI adoption is maturing around cost reduction rather than content innovation — a practical framing that prioritizes bottom-line savings over AI-generated journalism. The 42.3% shadow AI figure exposes a governance gap that IT departments and vendors will need to close, particularly as newsrooms compete for the same AI tooling budgets as enterprise customers. The 50/50 build-versus-buy split suggests a fragmented vendor landscape where neither approach has emerged as default. Watch whether the 18% vendor-scrutiny figure rises as regulatory pressure around AI data sourcing intensifies in 2025.

Digiday's March 2025 coverage of the Trint study added granular detail beyond the summary page: inaccurate outputs were the top concern for 72% of respondents, with reputational damage at 55% and data privacy at 45%. Digiday also spoke with a Business Insider employee who described personal AI tool use as falling into a "gray area" — "not approved, but not disapproved" — and noted that some journalists pay for AI tools out of pocket. Felix Simon, a research fellow in AI and news at Oxford University, told Digiday that the risk level depends on what journalists use the tools for: locally hosted models pose less danger than internet-connected systems fed with sensitive data.

The EBU's "News Report 2025: Leading Newsrooms in the Age of Generative AI," published April 2025 and authored by Dr. Alexandra Borchardt, took a broader lens by interviewing 20 newsroom leaders about AI implementation. The report found that media organizations have become "increasingly strategic" about deploying AI tools, balancing efficiency gains against accuracy challenges tied to public trust — a theme consistent with Trint's finding that creative work stays in human hands.

The Reuters Institute at Oxford University, in its January 2025 "Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions" report, found that 87% of respondents believe newsrooms are being "fully or somewhat transformed" by generative AI. The same report noted that publishers are actively exploring audience-facing AI features: 75% are looking into text-to-audio conversion, 70% AI summaries atop articles, and 65% translation — use cases that go beyond the back-office efficiency focus identified in Trint's survey. The Reuters Institute also reported a +56 net score of publishers planning to invest more in building relationships with AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity.

The New York Times approved specific AI tools — including Google's Vertex AI and NotebookLM — for its editorial and product teams in February 2025, per Semafor, while cautioning that unapproved tools could leave sources and information unprotected. That move mirrors the Trint study's call for newsrooms to formalize approved tool lists rather than relying on ad-hoc employee choices.