Digital
Indian digital journalism in 2025 was fragmented, says Delcom’s Vikram Singh
MUMBAI: Indian digital journalism in 2025 was shaped not by audience scale but by fragmented attention, collapsing trust and fundamental shifts in how content reaches readers. That is the assessment of Delcom News co-founder, chief journalist and chief platform architect Vikram Singh, who argues that publishers now operate in an environment where readers discover news passively rather than seeking it actively, loyalty has become rare, and credibility represents the industry’s most valuable asset.
Search engines, once the dominant gateway to news, have steadily ceded ground to social feeds, messaging applications and algorithm-driven interfaces. Traditional models of audience building have given way to a more chaotic landscape where publishers compete not just for eyeballs but for fleeting moments of attention across multiple platforms. The challenge, he suggests, lies less in reaching large numbers than in maintaining any meaningful connection with readers over time.
Indian Television Dot Com explores more about it in an interview with Singh.
If you had to describe Indian digital journalism in 2025 in one word, what would it be and why?
Fragmented. Indian digital journalism in 2025 was fragmented because attention, trust, language preferences, and platforms are all moving in different directions at once. Audiences are split across apps, short-form video, messaging platforms, regional-language ecosystems, and a handful of trusted news destinations. There is no single dominant gateway anymore. For publishers, this fragmentation means scale alone is no longer the marker of success—credibility, clarity of positioning, and repeat engagement matter far more than raw reach.
What was the single most important shift in digital news publishing this year?
The decisive shift was in distribution.Traffic moved away from search-led discovery to feeds, messaging apps, and creator- or algorithm-led surfaces. News organisations can no longer assume intent-driven discovery; instead, they must earn attention in passive environments. This has forced publishers to rethink headlines, formats, and even newsroom workflows—optimising not just for relevance, but for interruption in a crowded feed.
Did 2025 confirm or challenge your assumptions about how Indians consume news online?
It largely confirmed them but with a critical nuance. Mobile-first and video-first consumption are now defaults across age groups. What changed was the weight audiences place on trust. Reach without credibility no longer converts into loyalty. Audiences may sample widely, but they are increasingly selective about which brands they return to for verification, context, and depth.
What surprised you most about audience behaviour across websites, apps and social platforms?
What stood out was the contrast between breadth and loyalty. Audiences skim across dozens of sources daily, but they emotionally commit to just one or two brands they trust. This reinforces the idea that news consumption today is less about habit through volume, and more about habit through reliability and relevance.
Did digital audiences become more discerning in 2025, or simply more fatigued and scroll-happy?
They became both. Scroll behaviour increased, but tolerance dropped sharply. Audiences are quicker than ever to disengage from content that feels repetitive, shallow, or engineered purely for clicks. This fatigue has ironically made users more discerning—forcing publishers to earn every second of attention.
Which formats actually retained attention this year—short-form video, explainers, newsletters, live blogs or long-form reads?
Each format played a distinct role. Short-form video was unmatched in driving reach and discovery. However, explainers and newsletters were the strongest drivers of retention and habit. Long-form reads still performed well when tied to high-trust subjects, while live blogs remained event-specific utilities rather than loyalty builders.
Which 2025 events genuinely moved the needle for digital news in terms of scale and loyalty—and by how much?
National elections and extreme weather events were the most consequential. They drove traffic spikes of 2–4 times across platforms and, more importantly, led to double-digit improvements in app retention for publishers that invested in real-time explainers, local context, and verification-led reporting. These moments reinforced the value of being dependable under pressure.
Are audiences actively seeking news on digital platforms, or encountering it passively through algorithms?
Discovery is largely passive. Algorithms and social feeds now act as the front door to news. Active seeking still exists but it is reserved for major national moments or for brands that audiences already trust. This places greater responsibility on publishers to build recall and credibility outside breaking-news cycles.
What kinds of stories truly cut through the noise online in 2025?
Stories that respected the audience’s time and intelligence. Service journalism, hyperlocal relevance, clear explainers, and practical “what this means for you” narratives performed consistently well. Content that stripped away jargon and focused on outcomes, not opinions, earned stronger engagement.
Was 2025 the most dangerous year yet for misinformation online or the year it became most visible and contested?
It was the year misinformation became impossible to ignore. The scale and speed of false narratives forced platforms, publishers, and even audiences to acknowledge the cost of inaction. While misinformation remains a serious threat, 2025 marked a turning point where verification, labeling, and source transparency began to regain importance.
Did the pressure to be first on digital platforms make newsrooms more vulnerable to errors and misinformation?
Yes, particularly in live and social formats. The race for speed still often overrides verification. Newsrooms that lacked clear editorial guardrails or fact-checking layers were more exposed. The long-term lesson is clear: being first no longer guarantees trust, but being wrong guarantees loss of it.
Did regional-language digital platforms outperform English and national players in 2025?
Absolutely. Regional platforms consistently outperformed in engagement and loyalty. Their advantage came from cultural fluency, local relevance, and stronger emotional resonance with audiences. This trend underscores the future of Indian digital journalism as multilingual, decentralized, and community-driven.
What should digital news organisations stop doing immediately?
They should stop chasing clicks at the cost of trust. Low-quality, low-credibility content may inflate short-term metrics but erodes long-term value. Publishers must shift focus from traffic spikes to products and formats audiences return to daily, whether through apps, newsletters, or trusted explainers. In 2025, sustainability comes from loyalty, not virality.
Digital
The creative cull: how AI is coming for the marketers, ad men and researchers
Robots aren’t taking over yet, but the writing may already be on the wall for some of the US’ most glamorous white-collar jobs.
CALIFORNIA: The robots are not, it turns out, storming the factory floor. They are sitting quietly at a MacBook in a Soho agency, rewriting your copy, summarising your focus groups and generating your mood boards, and nobody has been sacked. Yet.
A new report from Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude chatbot, offers the most rigorous look to date at what artificial intelligence is actually doing to jobs, as opposed to what doomsayers and boosters claim it might. The verdict from economists Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory is nuanced but pointed: there is no mass unemployment so far, but some sectors have good reason to be nervous. Marketing, market research and the arts are squarely in the crosshairs.
The researchers introduce a new measure called “observed exposure.” It goes beyond theoretical speculation about what AI could do and instead tracks what it is already doing, drawing on real Claude usage data. The approach is clever. They weight automated uses, where the machine performs the job entirely, more heavily than augmentative ones, where it merely assists. They then map this onto roughly 800 occupations, weighted by how much time workers actually spend on each task. For now the target user base has been the US market, but the findings offer a glimpse of what may be happening in other countries as well.
The results are sobering for the creative and analytical classes. Market research analysts and marketing specialists clock in at 64.8 per cent observed exposure, meaning nearly two-thirds of their daily tasks are already being performed, at least in part, by AI in professional settings. The leading automated task is preparing reports, illustrating data graphically and translating complex findings into written text. In other words, this is the kind of work junior analysts spend most of their days doing.
Arts and media fare little better. The sector shows meaningful theoretical exposure, as large language models can in principle handle the lion’s share of tasks, though observed usage still lags behind capability. The gap is narrowing, however, and the direction of travel is unambiguous.
Here is the sting in the tail. The workers most exposed to AI disruption are not, as popular mythology suggests, low-paid drudges. They are older, better educated, more likely to be women and considerably better paid, earning 47 per cent more per hour on average than their least-exposed counterparts. Graduate degree holders are nearly four times as prevalent in the high-exposure group. The creative professional, the senior analyst and the market researcher with an MBA are precisely the people who should be paying attention.
“We’re not talking about the checkout operator,” the paper implies. “We’re talking about the account planner.”
The most alarming signal in the data concerns not those already in jobs, but those trying to enter them. Among workers aged 22 to 25, hiring into highly exposed occupations has slowed measurably since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022. There has been a 14 per cent drop in the job-finding rate, a figure the authors describe as “just barely statistically significant.” Young people are, in effect, finding the door to exposed professions quietly closing. Whether they are staying in education, taking different jobs or simply giving up is not yet clear.
For a bright graduate eyeing a career in market research or media production, this is not merely an academic data point. It is a flashing amber light.
The paper is careful about what it does not find. Unemployment among highly exposed workers has not risen in any statistically meaningful way since the ChatGPT era began. The apocalypse has not arrived. Even in the Computer and Math category, the most theoretically exposed of all, Claude currently covers just 33 per cent of tasks in practice. The gap between what AI can do and what it actually does at scale in professional workflows remains vast.
Think of it less like a tsunami, the authors suggest, and more like a slowly rising tide. The internet did not destroy journalism overnight. It took 20 years and the collapse of a generation of classified advertising revenue. The China trade shock also took decades to fully register in unemployment statistics, and economists are still debating the numbers.
What does this mean for the luvvies, the admen and the pollsters? The honest answer is: not much yet, but watch this space. AI is already doing the grunt work, including data summaries, draft press releases and boilerplate creative briefs. The question is whether it stops there or continues climbing the value chain.
The authors are building a framework to track exactly that and promise to update it as new data arrives. If the tide does come in, they want to see it coming before the sandcastles are already gone.
For now, the creative industries can breathe, but perhaps not too deeply. The machine is not at the door. It is already at the desk.
