Canada
The Canadian media landscape includes a well-established public broadcaster, strong private players, and a small but growing number of independent startups online. The future of Canadian journalism appears increasingly tied to the country’s digital sovereignty, as the government pursues arduous trade negotiations with the USA and reconsiders its support of news organisations alongside regulatory changes for online use.
Canada axed its Digital Services Tax on foreign-owned services like Netflix and resumed talks with Meta about returning news links to Facebook and Instagram. Independent TV stations showed that clips of their content were still being shared on Facebook and Instagram and argue the company should compensate news organisations under the Online News Act. TikTok, meanwhile, was allowed to continue operations in Canada.
The past year saw hundreds of layoffs in the industry and closures once again outpaced launches, especially among community news outlets. But no sector (television, radio, print, or digital) was spared.
A few new initiatives have emerged in response to the closures including Freshet News, a worker co-op in Metro Vancouver launched on the back of three Glacier Media newspapers shutting down. Online news platform The Level (readthelevel.ca) presents stories from two different viewpoints. Local Ink is a new e-edition platform for community newspapers. National Observer created a search tool for journalists covering municipal public meetings across the country. Relaunches of some print newspapers point to a modest comeback for paper as a medium.
The Globe and Mail refreshed its Life and Style sections, adding more than ten new journalists. The addition reportedly saw its traffic almost double while audience growth rose by over 60%.1 Taking a page from the New York Times playbook, it launched Globe Games, to boost user engagement beyond news. The Globe also adopted Mobian AI contextual intelligence to help advertisers better match placements with content whose tone and themes align with their values and messaging.
CBC is collaborating with Magellan AI to optimise growth in its podcast offerings. While the Canadian public broadcaster continues to dominate the domestic podcast market with seven of the ten top-ranked podcasts in the country, the most popular podcasts still originate from the United States, and Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre was a guest on The Joe Rogan Experience.
Métro Montreal was relaunched online using supervised and labelled AI-generated content. Several major news organisations (CBC/Radio-Canada, The Globe and Mail, La Presse) updated their AI guidelines. La Presse – which once again reported an operational profit – has taken legal action against OpenAI, following a lawsuit filed last year by a coalition of Canadian media organisations that includes CBC/Radio-Canada, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press, Postmedia, and Torstar. A research report concluded that major AI systems extensively ingest and reproduce Canadian journalism with little attribution or compensation (Owen and Bridgman 2026).
Content creators were an important source of election-related content in 2025, in some cases raising concerns about misinformation. HugoDécrypte, whose youth-oriented podcast and social media contents are widely popular in France, launched a bureau in Montreal, hiring local journalists. The Canadian Journalism Federation also launched a training programme for creator-journalists.
The increasing dependence of newsrooms on public or state-initiated funding (including Google’s contribution under the Online News Act), as well as the processes to determine eligibility, continue to attract criticism. A report submitted by a Canadian senator suggested a global policy approach for consistency, fairness, and transparency in government support to news media.
Several foundations consolidated their support for news initiatives into the new Journalism Future Fund, which awarded three-year grants totalling CAD 1.88m (USD 1.37m) to six small- to medium-sized organisations. The Globe and Mail launched a charitable foundation to provide education and training in journalism and to fund public interest journalism.
Sébastien Charlton and Colette Brin
Coordinator and Director, Centre d'études sur les médias
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.
Pay for online news
12%
(-2)
English-speaking: 14%
French-speaking: 12%
Avoid the news sometimes/often
45%
English-speaking: 46%
French-speaking: 38%
Trust in news overall
37%
(-2)
English-speaking: 35%
French-speaking: 44%
Global average: 37%
Overall news trust continues to decline slowly in Canada, reaching its lowest score for both French and English markets this year. Individual Canadian brands retain relatively high trust. Public broadcasters, despite frequent debates about their relevance and impartiality, are trusted by a majority of Canadians.
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
20/180
Score 78.76
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
