Looking Ahead

Moves by respected news organizations to be transparent in their reporting may become meaningless to consumers bombarded by such claims. This could even lead to what is being called “Trust Washing,” where claims of being a trusted news source are used by people spreading misinformation. This is just one of the predictions in a recent major report by the organization The DPP. In the new episode of the Making the Media Podcast, Edward Qualtrough, the DPP’s editorial director, discusses their 2025 Predictions Report which has just been published.

He tells host, Craig Wilson, that those who took part in the report feared that being open about reporting standards could become meaningless. “Consumers will essentially just lose interest and become completely immune to this in the same way that they might ignore cookie directives or the disclaimers that you select for your TS and CS. So, the more that organizations go out of their way to show how transparent they are, the more they'll just get ignored by consumers who aren't really that interested, and then it kind of loses the whole reason that it exists in the first place.”

This was just one of a series of predictions contained within the report, covering areas such as AI, security, investment, use of the cloud, and innovation. One area of potential growth was identified as data which could be used to fine-tune AI models.

In the episode, Edward says, “Who, in theory, has got reams of quality video, some of it's never been published, some of it might be very well tagged with metadata. I thought it's sort of an interesting bullish point that, of all the disruption going on in the industry, there are a lot of broadcast companies and rights holders who have fundamentally or potentially have quite a lot of power in helping train some of these models.”

Find out more in the new episode of the Making the Media Podcast, available on all major podcast platforms on Friday, March 7th.