READING TIPS

The Reuters Institute Digital News Report is being published for the fifteenth time this year and is considered the most comprehensive international study on news consumption. Media users in 48 countries were surveyed about their trust in the news, their preferred channels, and their use of new technologies such as AI chatbots.

Cision’s “State of the Media Report 2026” summarizes a survey of approximately 1,800 media professionals from 19 markets and highlights what they expect from PR teams. Accuracy and dealing with misinformation are now considered the biggest challenges in journalism, followed by resource constraints in newsrooms. It is precisely this lack of resources that increases reliance on PR: 66 percent of respondents turn to PR materials for story ideas.

The whitepaper “Predictive Communications: From [AlphaGo] to Narrative [Intelligence]” was written by Nanne H.C. Bos for the Scriptorium Initiative. It uses AlphaGo, Google’s AI specialized in the board game Go, as a starting point to ask what predictive AI means for communication, reputation and narrative strategy. The text draws the line early on: AI is not ascribed clairvoyant abilities. Instead, it functions as a tool for early warning, scenarios, narrative detection and dealing with disinformation.

In this article in the Corporate Communication Review, Christof Ehrhart, honorary professor at the University of Leipzig, discusses the role of corporate communication under conditions of radical uncertainty. The article asks how communication can provide orientation when companies have to deal with fragmented publics, politicized stakeholder expectations and technologically changed communication spaces.

The white paper “Building a Communications Team That Is Not Human” by Nanne H.C. Bos, published by the Scriptorium Initiative, documents an experiment on the question of whether the internal dynamics of a communications team can be replicated with agentic AI. The focus is on reconstructing the decision-making processes that shape communication before visible results emerge.

The “Communication Management Radar 2026” by Dr. Michelle Wloka and Prof. Dr. Ansgar Zerfass from the University of Leipzig, published by the Academic Society for Management & Communication, condenses five developments that structure practice on the basis of literature analyses and focus groups with communication managers. The report closely links these observations with concrete approaches to action, which are to be understood more as a shift in work logic than as operational instructions.

The Stakeholder Intelligence Report 2026 positions stakeholder intelligence as a data-based foundation for strategic decisions in reputation management. The changed context is central: perception arises in an environment of multiple crises (“polycrisis”).

The Employee Communications Report 2026 by Ben Reynolds and the communications team at consultancy Gallagher is based on surveys of more than 1,300 communications and HR managers from around 40 countries. The report is published as part of the “Workforce Trends Report Series” and examines how internal communication is changing under conditions of constant change, technological acceleration and rising expectations of the workforce.

The Edelman Trust Barometer 2026 is based on an annual online survey in 28 countries with almost 34,000 participants (field period: October/November 2025). The report bundles the assessments of the trust situation in business, government, media and NGOs and diagnoses a growing “insularity” in 2026 on this basis: an increasing reluctance to trust people or institutions that are perceived as different.

In the study “The Communicator’s Role in Driving Generative AI Adoption” published by the Institute for Public Relations (IPR) in February 2026, Olivia K. Fajardo analyses the introduction of generative AI in organizations based on over 30 interviews with communications and technology executives. The focus is on the question of how roles, processes and responsibilities are changing in communications departments.