These are some of the biggest trends – and challenges – facing the news ecosystem today, impacting India in new and unique ways. And this was the focus of a discussion organised around the launch of the Reuters Institute Digital News Report for 2025, a comprehensive study of news consumption worldwide.

Moderated by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s director Mitali Mukherjee, the panel comprised Nic Newman, senior research associate at the institute; Sannuta Raghu, journalism fellow at the institute and head of the AI Lab at Scroll; Ritvvij Parrikh, head of AI product at Times Internet; and Akash Banerjee, founder and host of The Deshbhakt.

According to the report, 55 percent of Indian users now consume news on YouTube, and 44 percent share news via social, messaging or email often via WhatsApp. Akash says there’s a clear indication towards television “taking a bit of a beating” while social media sees a “steady uptick”.

“You’ve got to be real and raw,” he says, and explains how consumption patterns are moving towards “snackable, biteable content”, where a shorter format is “much, much more prevalent than the longer format”.

Ritvvij talks about the challenges in using large language models that can sometimes “miss the news peg” of a story and therefore the need to deal with “detecting hallucinations”. He adds, “Trust in news is eroding and not just because of bad actors, but also because of opaque algorithms.”

Sannuta breaks down how AI can help news organisations “stay relevant” in some ways, converting text articles into videos that can be shared on Instagram. “The idea was…there are over 600 million smartphone users in India with access to cheap internet,” she says. She also explains the logistics of dealing with producing news in different languages in a country as diverse as India.

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“It is not only democracy that is on the ballot... but the realisation that we have a dictator in the making if we were to give Trump a second presidency,” says Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar in an exclusive conversation with Sreenivasan Jain.

On the high stakes in the elections, the prominent Muslim politician says that rights and liberties, “bodily autonomy,” policies like student debt cancellation, and the progress made us over the years will “under threat” if Trump comes to power.

Speaking about Kamala Harris’s candidacy, Omar says Gaza is a “huge blindspot” of the Biden government. “I have called on the president to impose an arms emargo… I do believe US laws and international laws are being violated. There is an ongoing genocide.”

On the challenges facing Kamala Harris, Omar says “most people don’t know who the Vice President is”. She also talks about Harris’s policies, challenges, and the consequences of the media’s “lost journalistic ethos”.

Watch our mini-series on the US polls

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In this episode of Another Election Show, Manisha Pande and Atul Chaurasia reached Jammu to understand the issues of the locals, particularly the youth, ahead of the third phase of polling in Jammu and Kashmir.

Following the recent delimitation process, the region has a total of 90 electoral seats – 43 in Jammu and 47 in Kashmir. the voting in three phases, with the final phase set to cover 40 seats simultaneously.

At Jammu University, we spoke to the students about their key issues, the region’s politics, and campus life. For most of them, employment, development and reservation were the main poll issues and not the abrogation of Article 370.

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