What is the future of comms when seismic shifts happen by the minute and second, and content, channels, and stakeholders are increasingly integrated and fragmented?
We. Communications’ Future of Communications 2026 report examines exactly this. Five modules and five key markets, the report is built on third-party evidence - industry datasets and platform updates, publisher scans across APAC, trend forecasts, expert interviews, and pilots. It is designed as a guide for earning attention in an AI and social-mediated world, distilling the big forces reshaping how stories are found, believed, and shared.
Diving deep into the “Earned Media: From Masthead to Models” module, Telum Media spoke with report co-author, Nichole Provatas, Executive Vice President and APAC Head of Integrated Marketing and Innovation. She shared insights into the power of earned, AI-enabled newsrooms, and what all this means for the future of communications in the region.
What’s the state of earned media in APAC? Where are we seeing noticeable shifts in the evolution of earned?
Earned media is moving - and has moved - from a single, concentrated orbit of mastheads to a constellation of influence. That includes social-first newsrooms, newsletters, podcasts, and now AI search. There are four drivers of this change.
The first driver is decentralised discovery. Nearly all major news sites have seen significant traffic pressure in 2025. Of the top 50 news sites in the U.S., including The New York Times, Forbes, and the BBC, only four saw any growth, and the only to see significant growth was Substack. Around 69 per cent of Google news searches now end in zero clicks as AI Overviews rise.
Second, large language models love earned authority. 95 per cent of LLM citations draw from non-paid sources - journalism, corporate blogs, and expert commentary - which flips the traditional marketing model on its head. Paid channels no longer drive discovery, creating a major opening for strong earned visibility.
Third, social is today’s front page, especially in APAC. Across the region, 65 per cent of people consumed social video news in 2025, up from 52 per cent in 2020. YouTube and TikTok reach about half of news audiences in India, the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand weekly.
Legacy outlets are adapting to being social-first. Singapore’s Straits Times now produces TikTok explainers, ABS-CBN is expanding digital in the Philippines, and News Corp Australia is producing vertical news shorts.
Lastly, newsrooms are retooling with AI: building chat interfaces and using it for translation pipelines (especially important in APAC). The pace is uneven across markets - but the direction is clear and the region is moving.
What is the state of trust in the APAC media?
Trust remains fragile. In markets like the U.S., trust has bottomed out. Closer to home, around 30 per cent of people in Taiwan and South Korea trust news. In Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, and the Philippines, it’s less than 40 per cent.
On top of that, the lack of trust has taken a darker turn: many believe the media deliberately misleads on certain stories - 72 per cent in India, 69 per cent in Malaysia, and 57 per cent in Australia. Audiences are seeking other sources of information, but no single channel has filled the void; the landscape has fractured - from creators to podcasters to Substacks.
Inside newsrooms, confidence is mixed: around four in 10 editors are confident about the year ahead, even as they lean into AI to fight misinformation, rebuild credibility, and improve workflows and personalisation. For example, Reuters is building out its global fact-checking teams for 24/7 monitoring. Singapore’s SPH Media Trust has set up a dedicated fact-checking service.
Audiences remain cautious about AI-generated news, though acceptance is higher in Mainland China and Singapore than Australia.
How has AI changed the information economy and traditional and earned media?
First, zero-click search reality is redefining visibility. The Pew Research Centre found users were less likely to click links when an AI summary appeared, and multiple follow-ups point to a significant move towards zero-click behaviour.
There’s a 6.7 per cent year-on-year decline in search-referral traffic to the top 100 domains - that's an 800 million click drop in one year. More people are finishing the journey on the results page, which is a very different reality for everyone - including media.
Second, inclusion in summaries now depends on clarity and authority. AI summaries prefer factual, structured, and well-sourced content. Clean data and reference-style pages perform best. Good earned content and strong .gov / .org / .edu-style assets travel well into AI answers.
For communicators, the opportunity is to become a reference hub - making earned content not just clickable but citable in AI answers.
Zero-click throughs and social first - how has the changing media landscape and social media consumption habits impacted how journalists now operate?
AI news is still embryonic for many brands, but social news is here. Over the last 12 months, newsrooms have retooled to package stories faster and in platform-native formats designed to be summarised or clipped without losing the core message. And behind the scenes, they’re investing more in YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram content, and who they’re hiring looks very different from five years ago.
In the past two years, many journalists have spun off to become independent publishers, or “journopreneurs”, to create content, build their own channels, and act as new mastheads.
Across APAC, journalists use Substack, podcasts, and social to curate their own ecosystems - like Jacques Manabat in the Philippines, Jordan Shanks-Markovina in Australia, and The Daily Ketchup in Singapore.
Comms teams are building programmes to engage with these platforms and integrating them into more traditional programmes, like events. Sourcing varies widely by market and population scale, but more are emerging every day.
Algorithms value earned; public trust in traditional news declines. Is there conflict with these findings? How can communicators help bridge this credibility gap?
It sounds like a clash, but it’s two layers of the same problem. Machines reward authoritative, transparent content - the same qualities that great earned programmes produce. People judge day-to-day credibility based on what they see - volume, polarisation, mistakes, corrections.
Communicators influence both AI systems and audiences by showing their work: publish primary data and methods, name experts and provide access, and support newsroom fact-checking - visibly and quickly. And be proactive with this information in your pitch and initial materials. Those actions help LLMs include you and help audiences trust you. Time is not your friend, and silence widens the trust gap.
The AI difference is speed. To prepare, go back to the basics of crisis and issues management and keep all the information at your fingertips. Instead of annual set-and-forgets, run more agile workstreams - review every three months to address new topics, surface new research, and double down on social listening with the right tools and teams across the constellation of influence. Surface potential issues early so they can be addressed at the right time.
In an increasingly complex and fragmented earned environment, how can communicators rethink strategy, especially with diminished resources across comms and media?
In APAC, we don’t have U.S.-level budgets, so comms teams need to strategise and prioritise for this fractured environment.
- Publish for AI inclusion: Treat your newsroom / key pages as reference hubs - plain-language summaries, FAQs, original data, and clear structure
- Pitch for social-first newsrooms: Beyond traditional press emails / kits, use DMs, short-video pitches, voice notes, and platform-native press kits (sound bites, B-roll, carousels, memes, and explainers) that make repurposing easy.
- Follow your audience: Develop YouTube Shorts, TikTok explainers, and podcasts with local translations.
- Blend validation with discovery: Pair high-authority earned coverage with paid search / social to capture incremental intent in zero-click journeys.
- Invest in trust signals: Fact-check, publish methodology notes, and update regularly, so publishers can verify quickly.
- Use AI to save time: Borrow from publisher learnings, like automated transcripts and translations, to scale formats without more headcount.
- Modernise measurements: Beyond coverage and share of voice, track inclusion in AI answers, citation quality, short form watch time, newsletter growth, and search lift in zero-click environments.
Bottom line: make stories easy to find, quote, and reuse by publishers, journalists, creators, communities - and AI.
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