AI in Journalism Futures 2025
Report on an AI-simulated Scenario Planning Project.
Download the AIFJ 2025 report (PDF)
Nicklas Stavnar, The Tinius Trust:
Introduction
The Tinius Trust is proud to present the publication «AI in Journalism Futures 2025». This report represents an experiment: what if we could compress a thousand voices, a year-long process, and human-scale deliberation into an AI-agent made report? What might we learn about both the futures being explored, and the tools we used to explore them?
David Caswell:
Overview and analysis
This article provides an overview and analysis of the AI in Journalism Futures 2025 (AIJF 2025) scenario development project and is intended to accompany the AIJF 2025 report. The project seeks to understand some of the plausible scenarios for journalism and societal information over the next 5 to 15 years, within an emerging information ecosystem that will likely by predominately mediated by AI.
The prompts
Prompt 1: Persona prompt
Create descriptions of one thousand (1000) real, fully realized, completely different people who are directly engaged in transformative innovation in digital journalism, digital media and use of AI in news products. Each description of each person should be created completely independently, following the requirements described below.
Prompt 2: Composite Twin Prompt
Please create 'digital twin' representations of 20 specific people listed below using the schema described below and based on complete and through research on each person.
Prompt 3: Short Scenario Prompt
Create 1000 short scenarios for how AI capabilities might fundamentally transform the global information ecosystem over the next 5 to 15 years, as assessed by specific people and following specific instructions. The scenarios should be imaginative but should also make sense, be written clearly and should be between 200 and 300 words long
Prompt 4: Judging Prompt
You are to set up a judging panel, comprised of 5 judges, for the task of evaluating a set of scenarios for how AI capabilities might structurally reshape the global information ecosystem over the next 5 to 15 years.
Prompt 5: Driving Forces Prompt
Read the 60 short scenarios described in the attached Excel file titled “All_Short_Scenarios.xlsx” and identify 30 ‘driving forces’ for the scenarios.
Prompt 6: Driving Force Analysis Prompt
You are to simulate 10 different 1-hour discussions that are part of a scenario planning workshop about the transformative implications of AI for news, journalism and the information ecosystem.
Prompt 7: End State Scenario Prompt
You are to simulate 10 different 1-hour discussions that are part of a scenario planning workshop about the transformative implications of AI for news, journalism and the information ecosystem.
Prompt 8: Proto Scenarios Prompt
You are analyzing transcripts and other materials produced in a series of discussions that are part of a scenario planning workshop about the transformative implications of AI for news, journalism and the information ecosystem. You are not interested in incremental implications. Your analysis is an ‘affinity mapping’ of these discussions, seeking to identify and extract the most important coherent end states from across all of the discussions.
Prompt 9: Dynamics Prompt
You are to simulate 10 different 1-hour discussions that are part of a scenario planning workshop about the fundamental and transformative implications of AI for news, journalism and the information ecosystem.
Prompt 10: Implications and Responses Prompt
You are to simulate a 1-hour discussion that is part of a scenario planning workshop about the fundamental and transformative implications of AI for news, journalism and the information ecosystem.
Prompt 11: Analysis Prompt
You are analyzing written material, transcripts and other information produced from a scenario planning workshop about the transformative implications of AI for news, journalism and the information ecosystem. The workshop is an AI-simulated version of the 2024 ‘AI in Journalism Futures’ report published by the Open Society Foundations. Your analysis will form the basis of a detailed report about the outcomes of the workshop – especially a set of detailed final scenarios for how the information ecosystem might be fundamentally transformed and restructured because of AI. The report will be authored separately, but it will be based entirely on the analysis you provide here, which must be rich and detailed.
Prompt 12: Authoring Prompt
Use the analysis from the attached text file titled ‘Final_analysis.txt’, write a detailed, comprehensive report describing various scenarios for the fundamentally transformation news, journalism and the information ecosystem caused by AI. The report is reporting on a 2025 workshop that is an AI-simulated version of the manually created ‘AI in Journalism Futures’ report published by the Open Society Foundations in 2024, which is attached here. Your detailed report will be titled “AI in Journalism Futures 2025”, and will follow the same structure, tone, approach and detail as the 2024 report while being entirely based on the attached analysis. It is intended as a 2025 version of the 2024 report, based on the new analysis.
The authors
David Caswell and Shuwei Fang
Shuwei is a fellow at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard. David is an independent consultant and researcher.
Nicklas Stavnar
Nicklas is Head of Foresight and Portfolio Manager at the Tinius Trust.