Brazil
Traditional media continues to lose ground as a news source in Brazil, while AI chatbots grow in popularity and social media use for news remains high. Despite an adverse environment, marked by declining trust in news and a shrinking paying customer base, the number of online media outlets grew in 2025.
Historically strong in Brazil, television is broadening its distribution networks with the launch of multi-platform channels. Owned by a major TV broadcaster, 24-hour news outlet SBT News debuted in December 2025, under a free, ad-supported streaming television (FAST) business model. Its content is available through cable, streaming platforms, and smart TVs, following in the footsteps of two all-news channels launched in 2024: CNN Money and The Times Brasil (a CNBC licensee).
This investment is driven by a hike in pay-TV advertising. Over the past three years, expenditure nearly doubled in nominal terms, according to the non-profit organisation Cenp,1 suggesting a move towards targeted audiences while broadcasters seek to diversify revenue. By comparison, ad spend on free-to-air television grew by a modest 4.6% over the same timeframe.
The shift towards segmentation comes as television’s dominance of the advertising market is under siege. Digital media accounted for 40.6% of the advertising expenditure last year, almost equalling television’s 41.3% share.2
Amid this challenging context, unions have reported layoffs at national networks such as RedeTV! and Record, highlighting ongoing efforts to reduce costs.3 CNN Brasil also implemented staff and programming cuts in mid-2025 before expanding its coverage this year with new agribusiness and infrastructure beats.
Meanwhile, veteran TV news presenter William Bonner stepped down from the Jornal Nacional anchor desk in October 2025, ending a 29-year tenure and marking the end of an era for the influential news programme.
Newspapers’ advertising share held steady at 1.4% year-on-year, mirroring the stable average daily paid circulation for the ten best-selling newspapers at slightly over one million copies, according to the Instituto Verificador de Comunicação (IVC). However, these figures exclude two leading Brazilian dailies, Folha de S. Paulo and O Estado de S. Paulo, no longer audited by the IVC.
A broader analysis of the publishing sector from Atlas da Notícia shows that 122 print outlets have closed since 20234, and many Brazilian municipalities lack a local news outlet. Meanwhile, the digital media landscape remains buoyant, with the number of online media outlets showing growth in 2025, even as the proportion paying for news online has declined 5pp since 2023 to 15%.
In a market where over half use social media for news weekly and influencers play an outsized role, a federal law enacted in January established the ‘multimedia practitioner’ as a regulated profession, formalising roles in digital content creation. The legislation drew mixed reactions. While the Brazilian Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters (Abert) welcomed the move as a recognition of market realities, the National Federation of Journalists (Fenaj) and various unions worry it will lead to more precarious working conditions for journalists.
The vibrant influencer ecosystem spans politics, entertainment, and specialist areas. For example, financial influencers are gaining ground in a field once dominated by the business press, as more Brazilians seek their advice on investing. A study by the Brazilian Association of Financial and Capital Market Entities (Anbima) mapped 904 active financial influencer profiles in 2025.5 Their combined audience reached 310m, reflecting a more than fourfold increase in five years. In response, legacy media outlets have expanded their digital portfolios, adding more video content, and mirroring social media formats and features.
The last year has also seen shifts in platform regulation. In June 2025, the country’s top court (STF) ruled that digital platforms can be held civilly liable for illegal third-party content, even without a prior court order, if they fail to immediately remove materials involving serious crimes, such as anti-democratic acts, terrorism, and racism. In March 2026, new legislation aimed at protecting children and adolescents online came into effect, mandating strict age verification and content moderation.
The rapid advancement of AI tools has sparked debate over the use of copyrighted material by AI developers, as weekly use of AI chatbots for news reaches 13%. In a joint statement released in February 2026, 12 Brazilian creative industry organisations, including radio, TV, and newspaper associations, announced the sector is ‘open to negotiating authorization and licensing models, as well as partnerships that ensure legal certainty and mutual benefits’. This follows a lawsuit Folha de S. Paulo filed last year, accusing OpenAI of unfair competition and copyright infringement.6 In late May, the newspaper dropped the lawsuit after reaching a commercial agreement to licence its journalistic content to ChatGPT.
Rodrigo Carro
Financial journalist; former Reuters Institute Journalist Fellow
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
Social media maintains a 9pp lead over television as a weekly source of news in Brazil, where 33% of the population gets content from creators or influencers who mainly focus on the news.
Pay for online news
15%
(-2)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
47%
(+1)
Trust in news overall
36%
(-6)
Global average: 37%
After three relatively stable years, trust in news dropped to a 12-year low in a context of persistent partisan polarisation, further fuelled by the 2026 presidential election and the arrest of former president Jair Bolsonaro last year. Political and financial scandals may have also contributed to declines. Nearly half (47%) of Brazilians say they avoid the news sometimes or often.
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
52/180
Score 66.37
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
Footnotes
1 https://www.cenp.com.br/cenp-meios
2 https://www.cenp.com.br/cenp-meios
3 https://sjsp.org.br/redetv-inicia-processo-de-demissao-em-massa/ https://jornalistas.org.br/2026/04/01/recordtv-demite-10-reporteres-cinematograficos-e-aprofunda-precarizacao-das-relacoes-de-trabalho/
4 https://atlas.jor.br/atlas-v-7/reducao-dos-desertos-de-noticias-no-brasil-e-impulsionada-pelo-crescimento-do-segmento-online/
5 https://www.anbima.com.br/pt_br/noticias/audiencia-de-finfluencers-cresce-mais-de-300-e-ultrapassa-310-milhoes-nas-redes.htm
6 https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/brazil/2025/08/folha-files-lawsuit-against-openai-for-unfair-competition-and-copyright-infringement.shtml