Australia
The re-election of Anthony Albanese’s Labor government with a greatly increased majority in May 2025 has had a major impact on media policy. Australia introduced the world’s first ban on under-16s accessing social media, and increased pressure on the platforms by moving from voluntary content deals to a new model obliging digital platforms to pay for news.
The social media age‑limit reform is intended to protect adolescents from grooming, mental‑health harms, algorithmic pressure, and exposure to harmful content. This stems from the Labor government’s commitment to the ‘digital duty of care’ since 2024, which places the onus on digital platforms to prevent online harms at a systemic level, instead of individuals having to enter at their own risk. After the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 was enacted in December 2025, platforms reported deactivating 4.7m accounts. Without algorithm transparency and safety‑by‑design reforms, the ban alone is unlikely to be effective in reducing harm. Media literacy education is also needed to prepare children for when they start to use social media.
Faced with Meta’s resistance to renewing the voluntary content agreements reached under the 2021 News Media Bargaining Code, the government created the News Bargaining Incentive (NBI). The NBI proposal, currently under consultation, will charge large digital platforms (whether or not they carry news) a percentage of their Australian revenue, which can be offset if they enter commercial agreements with news publishers.1
Following multiple government inquiries since 2017 into the declining news industry and public interest journalism, in December 2024 the government announced the News Media Assistance Program (News MAP) worth AU$180.5m (US$127m). News MAP is the largest direct public investment in Australian public and commercial journalism in decades, driven by a concern to support public interest journalism and media diversity, seen as critical to a healthy democracy, social cohesion, and informed citizens. It includes a Journalism Assistance Fund of AU$67.6m, a further AU$31.5m for a second phase of direct grants, AU$33m over three years in continued support for Australian Associated Press, and a minimum of AU$3m per year in federal government advertising for regional newspapers in 2025–6. The funding has generally been welcomed, though some have seen it as too little now and too late for the over 350 news outlets that had either closed or contracted in the previous five years (PIJI 2025).
As part of News MAP, the Australian Communications and Media Authority released the News Media in Australia 2025 report, providing an evidence-base to guide future policies on news diversity and sustainability.
The Labor government continues its broad support for the public broadcasters, ABC and SBS. From 2023, a five-year funding cycle was implemented, and the budget cuts from the former Coalition government were reversed, sustaining the support for regional journalism.
Commercial pressures continued to drive consolidation across television, audio, digital, and advertising. In April 2025, the UK-based sports streamer DAZN acquired Foxtel. Seven West Media and Southern Cross Media, Australia’s largest commercial radio operator, merged in early 2026.
The industry’s financial stress led to further layoffs. In November 2025, Nine Entertainment undertook major restructuring, cutting costs by AU$100m (US$70m) and eliminating about 50 jobs across their news teams. Print closures continued, particularly in regional areas where it was reported that more than 20 regional and community newspapers ceased printing or closed across the 18 months spanning late 2024 into 2025.2
The 2025 federal election marked a shift in how the media shape voting decisions. News Corp-owned publishers – The Australian, The Courier Mail, The Daily Telegraph, The Mercury, and Herald Sun – as well as Seven West Media’s The West Australian and The Nightly explicitly endorsed the right-of-centre Coalition. However, in a hybrid news ecosystem, influencers and independent digital-first publishers set the agenda which led to the Coalition’s defeat. Influencers such as Abbie Chatfield, Friendlyjordies, The Juice Media, Sam Fricker, and others became major political communicators during the campaign. Both Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton deliberately engaged influencers to access younger audiences. Shortly before the election, at the federal budget lockup – an embargoed event traditionally reserved for journalists – a dozen influencers were invited, which illustrates how news boundaries have shifted. While influencers provide a diverse range of perspectives, particularly for younger audiences, the uneven quality and the absence of agreed journalistic standards raise concerns.
Sora Park
News & Media Research Centre, University of Canberra
In the online survey we ask respondents which news brands they have used to access news in the last week. These figures are based on respondents’ recall of the news sources they have used, and should be understood as survey-based measures of weekly brand reach for news.
They are not the same as web analytics, audience ratings, or other audience measurement systems (such as BARB for television in the UK). Those approaches use different methods and may measure different things. Our figures are based on what respondents tell us in an online survey about which brands they have used for news in the past week.
It is also important to note that we ask specifically about use for news. Some multi-genre broadcasters, newspapers, or other providers offer content beyond news, and the figures in our report should not be interpreted as measuring the overall audience reach for these media organisations. They refer only to respondents who say they used that brand to access news.
How do you ask about offline and online news reach?
We ask about offline and online reach separately. First, we ask respondents which brands they have used to access news offline in the last week, via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. Then we ask which brands they have used to access news online in the last week, via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of internet access.
The questions as asked in the survey are:
Which of the following brands have you used to access news offline in the last week (via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media)? Please select all that apply.
Which of the following brands have you used to access news online in the last week (via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of Internet access)? Please select all that apply.
Respondents can select more than one brand in each question. For that reason, the figures do not add up to 100%. They show the proportion of respondents who say they used each brand for news in the last week.
How do you present the weekly news reach data in the report?
On each country or market page, we present the most widely used brands in two charts: one for offline news reach and one for online news reach. The offline chart covers use via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. The online chart covers use via websites, apps, social media, and other internet-based forms of access.
The figures shown are weekly news reach: the percentage of respondents who say they used that brand for news at least once in the last week.
These figures are useful for comparing the relative news reach of different brands within each market, and for understanding how news use is distributed across offline and online sources. However, they should not be treated as market shares or measures of total time spent with a brand.
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
The brand selection is a strategic sample and not a comprehensive list of all news providers in each market. We consult with country or market experts, review prior years’ Digital News Report data, and draw on other data sources to identify the most widely used brands for news across traditional and online channels.
In some cases, where a news provider operates a number of related news brands, we aggregate these under a single heading. For example, in the UK, reach for the BBC may include use of several BBC news services across different platforms. This is done to give a clearer sense of the overall reach of major news providers, but it means that figures may not always refer to a single programme, website, app, newspaper, or channel.
Because of survey length limitations, we can only ask about a limited number of brands in each market. The charts should not be treated as exhaustive lists of every brand used for news in that market. Due to space limitations, reach charts show up to 16 of the most used brands, though we ask about more in each survey.
How should the offline and online figures be interpreted?
A respondent may use the same brand both offline and online, and may also use several different brands in the same week. For this reason, the offline and online figures should not be added together to calculate a total audience. They are best read as separate indicators of how far particular brands reach people through different forms of access.
As with other survey-based findings, small differences should be interpreted with caution. We are careful not to claim that one brand reaches more people than another, or that a brand’s reach has changed, unless the differences are large enough to be meaningful. Any year on year change of 2 percentage points or lower is not considered statistically significant.
Changing media
Print and television news are in long-term decline, as the use of social media for news has increased. AI chatbot use for news rose by 3pp and podcast use by 4pp.
Pay for online news
23%
(+1)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
40%
(-)
Trust in news overall
43%
(-)
Global average: 37%
Trust in news remains in the low 40s and has changed little in recent years. Trust in major news brands has increased across the board. Public broadcasters – ABC and SBS – continue to be the most trusted news sources. Regional and local newspapers also rank highly, showing the lowest levels of distrust.
We ask each respondent to rate a number of popular brands (usually 15 in each country) according to how trustworthy they think each brand’s news output is. We do this on a 0-10 scale, where a score of 0 means that the respondent does not see the brand as trustworthy at all and 10 means that they see the brand as completely trustworthy – with 5 meaning ‘neither trustworthy or untrustworthy’. There is an option for those who have not heard of any particular brand to ensure that scores are based only on responses from people who are familiar with each brand.
When we come to report these scores, we add up the proportion of respondents that give a score between 6-10 and mark this as ‘trust’. We also add up the proportion that give a brand a score between 0-4 and mark this as ‘don’t trust’.
The question as asked in the survey is…
How trustworthy would you say news from the following brands is? Please use the scale below, where 0 is ‘not at all trustworthy’ and 10 is ‘completely trustworthy’.
As we make explicit throughout the report, including next to tables presenting brand-level trust findings, whether respondents consider a brand trustworthy or not is their subjective judgement. The percentage figures shown are aggregates of people’s personal opinions, they are not an objective assessment of underlying trustworthiness. We leave it to each respondent to form an opinion on whether they trust someone or something, and we field the question because we consider the resulting data to be important.
How do you present the trust data in the report?
We present the data in an alphabetised table. In the past, we presented this data as a stacked bar chart, but this led some to treat the chart as a list of the most and least trusted news brands in a given market, despite our explicit explanation this was not what the tables showed.
We present the data in a way that avoids giving small differences the appearance of great importance. In cases where there is around two percentage points difference or less between the brands, we cannot say for sure that one brand is more trusted than another. We are careful not to try to claim that one brand is more trusted than another or that trust scores have changed unless those changes are statistically significant.
Due to survey length limitations, it is important to note that we only ask about 15 of the most widely used brands. It is very likely that there are brands with lower (and higher) trust scores that we do not ask about. For that reason, we cannot say that any brand is the least (or most) trusted overall. Next to each chart we are careful to say: “Only the below brands were included in the survey. It should not be treated as a list of the most or least trusted brands as it is not exhaustive.”
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
We consult with country or market experts, draw on prior years’ Digital News Report data and other data sources to determine the most widely used brands (across traditional and online channels) when it comes to news. We also try to include ‘local newspapers’ or ‘local television’ as catch-all titles as we recognise their impact is considerable in most markets.
How representative is this 48-market survey?
The Digital News Report survey is based on an online poll but the methodology selects participants to be as representative of national populations as possible. Samples are assembled using representative quotas for age, gender, and region in every market and data is weighted to targets based on census/industry accepted data. The full methodology can be found here.
How do you try to contextualise the findings to ensure that trust scores are not taken out of context or misinterpreted?
Trust is one of a number of measures we track, including consumption of different sources, device usage, social media use, and much more. We aim to maintain consistency in our measurements year-on-year so that ratings of trust, levels of news consumption, and more, can be contextualised.
Country data is accompanied by an 800-word commentary from a media expert that aims to set the data in a wider context. We write a short commentary on the trust scores where appropriate, noting any statistically relevant changes.
RSF World Press Freedom Index
33/180
Score 74.58
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
