AI is Changing How Indian Newsrooms Reach Audiences

From the Editor’s Desk

July 6, 2026

Artificial intelligence is changing how Indian newsrooms reach their audiences, and the way outlets handle that change will affect what news people see, how well they can trust it and whether independent journalism can survive on platforms it no longer controls. This came out at a panel discussion at the India launch of the Digital News Report 2026, an annual study of global news consumption by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.

The study, the Digital News Report 2026, found that 39% of Indian respondents said they trust most news most of the time, close to the global average of 37%, the lowest in 11 years. The Indian survey also found that 58% of people expressed concern about fake news and misinformation online, and it recorded heavier use of newer formats than the global figures, with news podcast use at 17% against 11% globally and use of chatbots for news at 22% against 10% globally.

The panel that discussed the findings brought together outlets of very different sizes. Dhanya Rajendran, editor-in-chief of The News Minute, Pradeep Gairola of The Hindu Group and Sannuta Raghu of Scroll.in spoke with Mitali Mukherjee of the Reuters Institute, after a presentation by lead author Jim Egan. The event was held in partnership with Newslaundry.

Rajendran said the pressure begins with distribution. Google has become a less reliable source of traffic to news websites, and her outlet’s difficulty is reduced discoverability. Its response has been to move toward video, which puts it in competition with influencers and creators.

In India, social platforms have grown as sources of news over the past year and now sit close to television, led by YouTube and WhatsApp.

That move is problematic because smaller newsrooms may lack the staff to produce many videos, and content made under journalistic principles can struggle against creator videos on the same subject. “There is a language which a journalism platform can employ versus a language that a content creator can use, and many times we don’t want to cross certain lines, which is why I would say our videos can sometimes be boring,” Rajendran said.

She also warned that some outlets now give readers everything they want on the platform, so readers stop coming to the website, which starves the outlet of the traffic it depends on. Rajendran pointed to a boom of carousels on X and Instagram in which outlets lay out a whole article through slides, removing the reason to visit the website. She also mentioned an Indian newspaper using AI sentiment analysis to adapt articles to readers, softening graphic accounts of violence for younger audiences.

It seems legacy outlets take a different approach to the technology. The Hindu, 150 years old and still heavily reliant on print revenue, treats AI innovation as secondary to sustainability, said Gairola, its chief digital business officer. He said AI would become the outlet’s second biggest consumer after subscribers. For now, he backs news organisations blocking the AI crawlers that pull information from websites to feed large language models, and he wants developers brought to the table for a fair deal on news content.

Raghu pointed to a deeper danger in how newsrooms organise their data so that AI agents can use it. A newsroom produces original reporting, usually a text article, and AI systems produce summaries of that reporting. As agents crawl news sites and these summaries multiply, a reader or a machine can no longer tell the original reporting apart from the second-hand summary. She said that when original reporting and machine summaries mix together, an AI agent cannot tell which is which, and that this puts at risk any reliable record of what was first reported and by whom.

To guard against that, Scroll is building a trusted workspace, an accountable environment for researchers to use the outlet’s archive and selected external sources, Raghu said. She added that younger audiences in particular may come to consume news repackaged as a hyper-personalised experience made only for them. The question for newsrooms then becomes how to keep supplying their reporting to such a system without losing the careful editing, the signs that tell readers the work is trustworthy, and the responsibility a newsroom takes for what it publishes.

You have just read a News Briefing, written by Newsreel Asia’s text editor, Vishal Arora, to cut through the noise and present a single story for the day that matters to you. We encourage you to read the News Briefing each day. Our objective is to help you become not just an informed citizen, but an engaged and responsible one.