January ushered in a new year with sweeping disruptions in media, journalism, and public humanities. Technology-driven partnerships, staff cuts, and mergers have redefined the online media landscape kicking-off 2025, calling into question journalism’s position in an age of generative AI. Read the highlights below.

Washington Post Cuts PR Staff - Shifts to Star Talent Unit

The Washington Post eliminated 73 positions within its advertising department, effectively gutting its public relations infrastructure. Advertising is the Post’s primary source of revenue. The department responsible for promoting The Post’s journalism across traditional media outlets is shifting focus toward its “Star Talent Unit,” anticipating a promotion strategy more in line with contemporary social media’s talent-driven content to connect their advertising clients to their subscriber base. In a memo to staff, The Post shared that the Star Talent Unit aims to “ensure our audiences know who our journalists are and rely even more on these trusted voices” shifting the role of journalists more toward that of influencers and content-creators.

Google Partners with the AP to Feed Gemini Content

Google and the Associated Press (AP) cut a deal this month to feed Gemini, Google’s marquee generative AI software, with a steady stream of content from the news publisher. In a first for Google, this partnership between tech giant and news outlet hopes to satisfy Google’s demand for high quality and ethically sourced training data for its AI and further diversify the AP’s revenue stream in an age of declining income from traditional sources. The AP signed a similar deal with OpenAI in 2023 allowing them free use of the AP’s news archive to train ChatGPT.

OpenAI Funds Axios Expansion

OpenAI entered into a three-year partnership with Axios to finance the local newsletter’s expansion into four new markets: Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Boulder, and Huntsville. OpenAI has accrued a bullpen of licensing and content-sharing partnerships with news sites recently, counting the Financial Times, Vox Media, and The Atlantic among its media-partners. The Axios deal is the first time OpenAI has directly funded a media-partner’s business operations, potentially signaling deeper ties emerging between AI companies and the media.

Getty Images and Shutterstock Merge

Getty Images and Shutterstock announced a merger, with the new company being valued at approximately $3.7 billion and continuing under the aegis of Getty Images Holdings, Inc (GETY). Both organizations are behemoths in the stock media industry, and the merger presents significant cost synergies paired with a considerably expanded catalogue of photography, audio, and video available for licensing. Inked in the shadow of AI-driven disruption in the visual asset space, the consolidation of stock media giants suggests competitive pressure to satisfy the rising demand for cheap assets at scale and the challenge to stay relevant in an image economy that has become heavily influenced by ever-improving generative AI models.

Meta Faces Blowback over AI Profiles

Meta rolled out, and quickly rolled back, a collection of AI-powered profiles on Facebook and Instagram. Originally debuting in 2023, most profiles had been decommissioned by 2024, but a new push to grow the number of characters began this month, reigniting a significant public backlash over how the teams responsible for developing these profiles of non-white women are predominantly made up of white men. This comes at a time when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg very publicly halted DEI programs at Meta and ended third-party fact-checking arrangements on its platforms.

Collectively these deregulatory actions largely mimic those taken by Elon Musk at X and raise questions over the future of the social media landscape. New competitor Bluesky gained enormous popularity in 2024, in part due to its decentralized organization, and Mark Cuban announced an intent to finance the development of a similar alternative to TikTok amid its own political turmoil. It remains to be seen how legacy social media like Meta and X will handle large scale exodus.

New York Requiring reporting on Jobs Replaced By AI

With AI already disrupting job markets and roles across industries, New York has introduced a first-of-its-kind policy on AI-related job replacement. Governor Kathy Hochul announced an executive action plan that would require businesses to report on job losses caused by AI in an attempt to better measure and understand its impact on the labor market. Attempting to better inform public policy, the requirement is not a restriction on the adoption of such technology. Hochul also announced $20 million in funding for minority startups to improve training in AI capabilities. These policies preempt anticipated technology shocks and could better underpin attempts at servicing large-scale disruptions, job loss, and retraining needs in the labor market.

Source: Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images

New Journal for Public Humanities Introduced

Published by Cambridge University Press, a new open-access journal aims to “strengthen the connections between university-based humanities work and the wider world” amid increasing budget cuts to the humanities across higher education. The new journal, titled Public Humanities, is driven to be an inclusive space for “scholars, students, activists, journalists, policy-makers, professionals, practitioners, and non-specialists to connect and share knowledge” accepting humanities work from a broad array of disciplines in order to shed light on public humanities work being done by those who might be unaware of the term or the field to begin with. With plans to expand the board of editors to include members of the ten types of public humanities (including journalists, activists, and museum and library workers) the journal seeks to broaden the engagement of the humanities beyond the academy and reignite a public consciousness of the necessity and utility of the humanities in modern times.