Croatia
Croatia’s small media market showed strong growth, especially in the digital segment, in the last year. The structure of the news industry remains largely unchanged – with offline use dominated by two foreign-owned TV news channels (Nova and RTL) together with the public broadcaster (HRT). While the EU Directive on media freedom is being implemented, in practice press freedom is still threatened.
Advertising revenues are the lifeblood of most Croatian media and 2025 was a pretty good year. Industry estimates suggest that legacy media ad revenues (TV, radio, print, and outdoor advertising) increased by 9% from €215m in 2024 to €234m in 2025. But this overall picture conceals big variations, with TV and outdoor revenues up by 6%, radio by 5%, and print static. Meanwhile, digital advertising is estimated to have grown by 11% in 2025 to a total of €191m. Online revenues now account for 45% of the market, suggesting a relatively highly developed digital market.1
Croatia has been plagued for years by the problem of hidden media ownership – where the listed proprietor (often in local media) conceals the identity of the real owner. Our survey evidence this year shows that Croatians believe that ownership really does matter: 72% of Croatian respondents said that they thought media owners had influence over news coverage, only just behind a 74% who said that governments and politicians had such influence. One step forward towards greater transparency of media ownership was the creation in 2025 by the Ministry of Culture and the Media and the Agency for Electronic Media (AEM) of a searchable online database for the revenues and declared owners of all audiovisual and online services.2
The major commercial TV companies have been foreign-owned for over two decades, and are prominent among our most widely used news sources. Nova TV (United Group since 2017), RTL 2 and Doma TV (both owned by Czech-based Central European Media Enterprises CME, since 2022) all had their broadcasting licences renewed in 2025 for 20 years.
Tabloid 24 sata, owned by the Austrian Styria group, is still the best-selling newspaper and attracts large numbers online, while the domestically owned Hanza media group retains market leadership in print media overall. Among the significant problems remains the lack of distribution of print media, after the main company stopped print distribution in its network of kiosks in 2025. Print newspaper circulation declined from 80m to 24m copies p.a. in the last ten years and even though the Croatian Post Office (HP) received a €90m government subsidy over five years for print distribution, newspapers are still not available in many rural areas.
The PSB HRT remains in financial difficulties. Their director Robert Šveb cites rising costs overall (especially the costs of sports rights) resulting in reduced in-house production and very low salaries. Faced with competition from commercial streaming services, HRT has launched its own free streaming service, HRTi, with 257,000 monthly users. Croatia’s implementation of the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA) gives the regulator, the Agency for Electronic Media (AEM), oversight of the election of HRT’s governing bodies. Opinions are divided between those who criticise inadequate protection for media pluralism and against political and economic pressure, while others fear the enlarged mandate of the regulator AEM.
Press freedom is under threat in Croatia with increasing numbers of attacks on journalists in recent years and 35 recorded in 2025.3 In their 2025 report, Reporters Without Borders found that press freedom was at its lowest level since 2014, though the 2026 report shows some improvement. Many observers are concerned about the often precarious position of journalists who face both economic uncertainty and abuse from many in the political sphere. In spite of these difficulties, investigative journalism continues to expose abuses of political power and public authority, contributing to a vigorous critical public sphere.
Podcasts remain popular. Some legacy media such as national print dailies Jutarnji list and Večernji list have started their own podcasts. One of the most popular (with over 420,000 followers on YouTube) is the Podcast Inkubator, created in 2017 by a group of independent journalists covering topics from politics to sport and everything in between. Projekt Velebit is a prominent right-wing podcast covering domestic and international politics, while a growing recent news podcast, Prvi glas (First News), is produced daily by the left-leaning website Telegram. Despite the generally low level of people paying for online news in Croatia (8%), Telegram launched a major subscription drive in 2025 and reported that subscriber numbers increased by more than 50% in the year.
Zrinjka Peruško
Centre for Media and Communication Research, University of Zagreb
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
There are no dramatic changes and existing trends continue. Online as the source of news has increased modestly, while social media remains stable. Both television and print are in decline.
Pay for online news
8%
(+2)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
63%
(+2)
Trust in news overall
29%
(-7)
Global average: 37%
Trust has fallen to its lowest level (29%) after a 7pp decline fuelled by leading politicians’ hostility to independent reporting. The most-trusted brands are commercial NovaTV and RTL news and the PSB HTV, followed by Otvoreni radio and various local/regional radio stations. Dailies Večernji list and Jutarnji list follow. T-portal and Index.hr are the most-trusted online sources.
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
53/180
66.31
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
