<p>Did the Year 2025 Force African Journalism to Confront its Future? A Review of Scholarship and Practice</p>

The year 2025 marked a decisive turning point in journalism as artificial intelligence (AI) shifted from a newsroom support tool to a dominant interface through which audiences encounter news. In African contexts, journalists in Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, and Tanzania increasingly reported that their work circulated through AI-generated summaries, conversational agents, and predictive feeds rather than newsroom-controlled platforms. This shift positioned AI as an infrastructural force shaping visibility, relevance, and authority in public communication. Drawing on African journalism scholarship, this article reviews how 2025 intensified long-standing tensions around political economy, epistemic representation, and journalistic accountability. While generative AI offered practical benefits for transcription, research, and verification in resource-constrained newsrooms, it also amplified concerns about attribution, data extraction, linguistic marginalization, and editorial erosion. The spread of synthetic media during elections and crises further reasserted the indispensability of human verification and locally embedded trust. This review argues that AI’s significance for African journalism lies not in adoption, but in struggles over governance, ethical authority, and political economy, and it outlines a research agenda grounded in epistemic justice, contextual accountability, and democratic communication.