Our 2026 report finds news audiences around the world reacting with growing unease to successive episodes of political, economic, and technological turbulence. Assumptions about the way the world works are being questioned as longstanding international alliances shift, the global trading system comes under strain, and the basic shape of the post-war order appears uncertain. At the same time, people are adapting to the rapid diffusion of artificial intelligence across many aspects of everyday life and, for many, the practical realities of climate change are increasingly being felt.

As the world changes at accelerating speed, news media report and update on these events around the clock, jostling for a share of the four to five hours each day that people devote to their smartphones. For some, this means new opportunities to stay close to news stories as they unfold; for others, it risks creating a sense of overload.

Our 2025 report was characterised by relative stability in many of the indicators we have tracked for over a decade. The data this year point to greater volatility, reflecting this heightened sense of uncertainty. We see a range of responses: anxiety, disengagement, and cynicism, but also openness to new sources and formats, and continued belief in what news at its best can offer.

Within the news ecosystem, an apparent paradox emerges between behaviour and attitudes. There is continued change in news consumption in favour of social media, video networks and, more recently, AI. At the same time, concerns about trust in news, about misinformation, and about the wider impact of these platforms are all increasing.

A central theme this year is this growing ‘platformisation’ of news consumption. For the first time, social media and video networks are, on average across the markets covered, more popular than both TV and owned news websites and apps as sources of news. Growing numbers are also experimenting with AI chatbots as a new means of access. When online, people increasingly like to watch rather than read the news, often drawing on a wider range of sources and voices. Some of the new contributors are credible, innovative, and making a positive contribution to the range of news choices. This report explores in detail the rise of creators and other emerging news producers, the role they play in this changing environment, and what audiences value about their content.

Against the backdrop of disruptive political, economic, and social change, core news values nevertheless remain relevant. While opinions may be fragmenting in many countries, support for principles such as impartiality persists, even if audiences express dissatisfaction with aspects of their current news experience. People still care about what news and journalism – in new ways and in some traditional forms – aspire to.

Now in its fifteenth year, the 2026 edition of the Digital News Report seeks to capture these global trends while also reflecting the variation of news habits and attitudes across countries and also within them. Some of this year’s report makes for unsettling reading, but it is an especially unsettled time both for the news media sector and for the world at large. Our findings may invite questions about how far news organisations are either to blame for or in control of the key trends. It is perhaps more constructive to acknowledge the anxieties and concerns expressed by audiences and to focus on what journalism can do to help people interpret what is happening and its relevance to their daily lives.

Main findings

1. Social media and video networks overtake news websites and apps

As audiences’ use of traditional news sources continues to decline, the role of news consumption via social media and video networks becomes more prominent. Though it has been the case in some individual countries for several years, at the global level (averaging across 48 markets) social media and video networks are for the first time the single most widely used way of accessing online news (used by 54% of all respondents), ahead of news organisations’ own websites and apps (51%). This shifting composition of news consumption is happening among all age groups.

2. AI chatbots as a new frontier in intermediated news consumption

The use of AI chatbots for news is growing quickly but not as quickly as AI use for other purposes: 10% of people use AI chatbots for news, up from 7% last year. Usage is predominantly by those most interested in news and is more concentrated among younger audiences (16% of under-35s report using AI chatbots for news).

South Korea, Greece, and Spain all saw use of AI chatbots for news double year on year, but growth was not universal. Several markets including the USA, the UK, France, and Germany reported no increase in AI chatbot use for news over the year. AI chatbot users seem to appreciate the extra depth or explanation which comes with using chatbots for news; the most popular feature (42% of respondents) is the ability to ask follow-up questions.

3. Online video marches on

For the first time, a majority of people now watch online news video in all 48 Digital News Report markets: 77% of people globally consume online news video each week. Additionally, in 45 markets more people now watch online news video than watch broadcast TV news – Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands are the only three countries where TV news leads or is on a par with watching news online.

The growth in online video consumption is all happening on third-party platforms. Mainstream news organisations have on average seen video consumption on their own sites and apps go backwards, down 5 percentage points (pp) this year.

TV news is in decline, but for some there is a new role for news on the television set: a quarter (27%) of our respondents now watch on-demand news via apps like YouTube on their smart TVs.

Since the pandemic, growth in the use of third-party platforms has been concentrated among platforms which are video-led rather than text-based. The first wave of social media growth hit newspapers hardest. Now the second wave is affecting news organisations’ TV and video interests. TikTok (growing fastest from a small base, used by 20% globally for news) and Instagram (more modest growth, but a more significant presence – 26% usage for news) are the fastest growing video-led networks and they are driving much of the change together with YouTube (34% for news). Facebook remains the biggest platform overall for news consumption (used by 43% this year), reversing recent declines.

4. Creators at the forefront of video growth

Around a quarter (27%) of respondents globally get some news from news-focused individual creators or influencers, and almost half (46%) get some news from creators of any type. Respondents say creators are more entertaining, easier to understand, and more relatable than traditional news outlets. On average, people think creators are less trustworthy and less impartial compared to other attributes such as authenticity and relatability.

Most people who get news from creators are using them alongside traditional media – not instead of it. In fact, those who access creators consume more traditional media than the average respondent. Averaged across all of our markets, 13% of respondents say that most or all of their news needs are met by creators who focus on news and only 3% of people are relying solely on creators for their news.

5. Interest in news falling

Since 2021, the proportion of people saying they are ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ interested in the news has fallen by an average of 13pp across the markets we survey. A quarter (25%) of respondents are now casual or passive news users who typically only consume news once a week and say they have little to no interest in it, up from 16% in 2021. But although there are fewer highly engaged ‘news lovers’ in almost every country, these news enthusiasts are relatively undiminished in their usage, engagement, and propensity to pay – a smaller, but durable, target market.

6. Trust in news at a low

Trust in news has fallen in 29 of our 48 markets this year, resulting in a drop overall to the lowest level we have recorded since we started to measure trust in 2015 (37%). Trust fell by 5pp or more in 19 markets. In the United States, only a quarter (25%) of people now say they trust the news most of the time. Some of this worldwide drop in trust reflects wider anxieties beyond the news industry – trust in institutions and leaders is widely declining, and journalism is also often under direct attack from high-profile politicians. Despite these pressures, trust in the most widely used individual news brands is holding up better than trust in news overall.

Reductions in trust are also related to changes in the news consumption mix. Social media and video networks have long been trusted less than traditional news media, so trust overall is prone to go down as more people’s consumption tends towards using social media and video networks (and AI chatbots) for news at the expense of legacy sources. We can probably expect trust in news overall to fall further in future, but trust for many established news providers appears to be defying this trend.

Concerns about fake news are also up, by 4pp to 62% on average, with jumps of more than 5pp in 11 markets. Only in one market (Brazil) did misinformation concerns decrease (-3 pp). As people’s use of third-party platforms goes up so do worries about misinformation, but convenience appears to trump concern.

7. Paying for news also challenged by the drift away from direct consumption

The percentage of people paying for access to online news in the basket of 20 countries we track is unchanged at 17%. Growing reader revenue is likely to prove harder as the flow of people into the subscription funnel coming to news websites and apps reduces. But there is interesting variation in the types of organisations people support, and why, and this points to opportunities. Significant numbers of people are supporting non-traditional news outlets financially. People mainly pay for news for the direct benefits they get from the content they want to access (81% say this is at least part of the reason for paying). But almost half (46%) of respondents who pay for news also express values-based motivations for paying (such as supporting journalism because of its importance to society) and some news organisations are capitalising on this.

8. Enduring support for impartiality as an ideal…

Against this turbulent backdrop people still support the idea of impartiality in news coverage. Although support for impartial news has fallen since 2020, those who say they prefer it still outnumber those who prefer news that shares their point of view by more than two to one. Almost half (45%) of respondents still prefer news which does not take sides, and a similar share (46%) also believe consuming news which does not take sides is best for others in society. At a time when commentators often assert that the idea of impartiality is now in the past, audiences (including younger ones) remain supporters of it in the main.

… But misgivings about the reality of news

Support for the way news should be is not the same as satisfaction with the way news is. Our data reflect discontent with the way news media are covering many of the big, global stories. Immigration in particular seems an issue which is hard, perhaps even impossible, for the news media to get right. Significantly more people (11pp net difference globally) think that the news media is doing a bad job rather than a good job of covering immigration.

In 26 countries with significant public service media (PSM) news providers we find variations in agreement with the proposition that public service news has a positive social impact. Across these 26 PSM markets overall, people in the aggregate believe that public service news has a positive impact on life in their countries (37% positive against 22% negative), but this is not the case everywhere. Markets where sentiment is more mixed tend to be ones where trust in news generally is lower and polarising political dynamics are more evident. In the US, Germany, Spain, the UK, and elsewhere there are also very large differences in attitudes about the social impact of PSM news between those on the left and the right of the political spectrum.

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Jump to insights on: AI chatbots | Interest in news | Trust | News coverage | Influence on the news | The rise of video | News creators | Paying for news | Impartiality | Public service media 

The continued drift away from direct news consumption

For several years we have reported the trend of news consumption away from sources such as TV, radio, newspapers, and ‘owned and operated’ news websites and apps towards news consumed via platforms, by which we mean social media, video networks and – more recently – AI chatbots.

2026 represents a significant milestone: for the first time, social media and video network consumption is now ahead of other news sources as the most widely used source of news globally (54% of all audiences). The use of both TV news and news organisations’ websites and apps has fallen by 13pp and 12pp respectively since 2020. The relative decline of television as a source of news is well recognised across the industry. What is perhaps less well acknowledged is that people’s use of news websites and apps has declined at a similar rate in recent years.

54%

Share of people globally using social media and video networks for news (56% if AI chatbots are included)

Over the same period, social media and video networks have been largely stable in terms of global usage but, mainly as a result of ongoing falls for TV (to 52%) and news websites (to 51%), these third-party sources moved into the lead this year.¹ Adding in AI chatbots as the newest source of news gives a combined third-party total of 56%. It is better to think of this more as a drift rather than a shift, but it is nevertheless an important moment.

When people use social media and video networks they will often be doing so to consume news from established providers, but increasingly this is part of a more complicated news diet and one where news organisations are having to battle hard for their share.

Just about all news organisations have focused their strategic efforts on the transition to digital over the past ten years, and many of these digital transitions have been very successful. But even the most digitally advanced news organisations are increasingly having to contend with the reality that in most countries intermediated third-party consumption platforms are more popular than the branded digital properties publishers themselves have built. This has obvious implications in terms of prospects for audience reach, engagement, and monetisation potential, at least ‘on site’ where the potential is greatest.

Social media and video networks as a source of news grew by 3pp this year on average. At the country level, their use for news increased in 22 of the 48 markets. Not all this growth will necessarily be demand-led. On the supply side, Meta publicly stated in 2025 that it would increase the volume of news content on Facebook and this is likely to have had an impact on reported usage levels.²

Social media and video networks are now more popular as a source of news than owned and operated online news websites and apps in 30 of our 48 markets. Of the markets where consumption of news websites and apps still leads social media and video networks, four are in Asia – Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan – the rest are all in Europe.

The proportion of people identifying social media and video networks as their main source of news also rose this year in 22 markets – including countries like Germany where use for news has been low historically (up 4pp to 18%) as well as in places such as Indonesia where they have long been in the lead (up 8pp to 48%).

Globally, 30% of people now say social media and video networks are their main source of news – up from 22% five years ago. The reasons for this shift will be mixed: for some, these third-party sources are just a better way of getting news; for others it is more likely to be a consequence of reduced usage of TV and news websites and apps. The proportion of people now only using social media and video networks for news has risen to 12% this year (doubling from 6% in 2020) – many of these individuals are in effect withdrawing from getting news in a variety of different ways and relying instead on seeing news occasionally when doing other things online.

AI is the other third-party source of news to see more recent growth.³ Weekly use of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google Gemini for news increased year-on-year from 7% to 10%. This is certainly a significant proportional rise but news consumption via AI platforms does not (yet) appear to be exploding – although usage has doubled, from small bases, in some countries including Greece (to 12%) and South Korea (to 14%).

Looking back over the five years since the peak of the pandemic the trend is very clear. Whatever growth is left in online as a preferred way of getting news is almost all to third-party sources – social media and video networks and AI chatbots. The example of former Polish president Andrzej Duda’s series launch on Kanał Zero last year neatly illustrates a few trends quickly becoming global: politicians going direct to audiences as news creators; online video channels rapidly building large followings; and established news media being side-stepped.

Usage of news podcasts is unchanged this year at 11% globally and in fact is unchanged in most markets (the only significant increases were a rise in podcast listening of 4pp in Australia and 3pp in Peru). Podcasts do well at attracting an enthusiastic audience and can be a good way of reaching younger audiences. The format also continues to evolve, with many podcasts now being video-led, implying that at least some podcast consumption will show up in our online video data (more later).

Globally, more than half (52%) of respondents aged 18–24 now say that social media, video networks, and AI chatbots are their main way of getting news. This is 32pp more than the next most popular main source. For audiences aged between 18 and 34 the decline in their use of news websites and apps has been faster than that of television news. These digital news sites and apps now show signs of starting to skew older and are no longer the main source of news for any single age group globally. As the chart shows, millennials and GenZ prefer to get their news from social media and video networks, while TV remains the main source of news for people aged 45 and above (note that the percentage point change figures in the chart compare 2026 and 2021 main source data, and also that we did not ask about AI chatbot usage in 2021).

These generational contrasts in news consumption behaviour are increasingly pronounced, with big differences in most markets in terms of the main sources from which people in different age brackets get their news. Distinctive consumption patterns are not just seen in the youngest age groups either: people up to the age of 35 have a different relationship with news sources than their older compatriots. 

The next chart illustrates this contrast in terms of how audiences in the United States were keeping up with news about the war in Iran (these data are from supplementary polling conducted in late March 2026). Audiences under the age of 35 said using social media and video networks was the best way to follow the conflict and were more than twice as likely to say this than people aged 35 and over. It was the opposite story when it came to TV, with double the percentage of people over 35 choosing TV news as the best way relative to those aged 18–34. As many younger Americans were not following news about the war at all as were principally using news websites and apps, while 19% of those aged over 35 were mainly relying on these sources.⁴ 

A perennial question is whether younger people with these distinctive news consumption patterns will eventually acquire the habits of their parents as they enter middle age and beyond. In fact, looking at the data globally (see the next chart), few people of any age group have fixed news habits. When we asked people if they have consistent daily routines for things like the locations they are in when they are consuming news, time of day, and daily frequency, a clear majority of people say these things often vary or are different each day. Younger people are even less likely to have fixed patterns of news use than people in other age groups. Two aspects of news behaviour appear not to vary much by age: the topics people are interested in and the devices they use. But again, most people do not have fixed habits for these either.

56%

Proportion of young people who globally have never regularly read a newspaper

This year we also asked those who had not used certain news sources in the last week whether they have ever consumed them on a weekly basis, allowing us to differentiate between people who had lapsed from using particular news sources and those who had never regularly used them. There seems to be little reason to expect younger adults will gradually adopt the habits of older generations as they age. At the global level, 56% of people aged 18–24 who did not read a newspaper in the last week report they have never read one regularly. The equivalent figure for television news is 21%.

A significant industry debate over the past year has been over what has been dubbed ‘Google Zero’ – the concern that changes in both search consumption patterns and in the way search engines work with the introduction of AI might result in precipitous falls in referral traffic to news sites. Looking just at what audiences say they are doing rather than at how search engines are answering queries, this year’s data indicate that search as the main gateway to news is unchanged for older audiences, but is down (-3pp) among those aged under 35.

This does not of course mean correspondingly little change in the referral traffic which search engines and aggregators are sending to individual publishers. The ongoing rollout of both AI Mode and AI Overviews to Google’s search experience is widely assumed to be affecting referral traffic, especially for some types of queries (although hard news search queries mostly remain excluded from AI Overviews). Aggregate data, sourced from the analytics company Chartbeat for our 2026 Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions 2026 report (Newman 2026) show that Google traffic from organic search to over 2,500 sites was down by a third (33%) globally between November 2024 and November 2025, and by 38% in the United States. Looking ahead, publishers expect traffic from search engines to almost halve (-43%) over the next three years.

Adjacent to search (literally for many online users) Google Discover now accounts for a large and growing proportion of aggregator usage in many markets, which underscores why many publishers are uneasy about their reliance on it. While Google News is Google’s dedicated news aggregator, Google Discover (launched in 2018 as a replacement for Google Feed) is a highly personalised, mobile-first feed that suggests a mix of news, evergreen content, and videos based on a user’s specific interests and search history. While our data show increased use overall, some publishers are reporting declines in their own traffic. In the UK’s Press Gazette in March 2026, ‘Chief executive Piers North told investors Google Discover traffic to Reach [a publicly listed UK news publisher] sites was down 46% in the second half of the year as the platform prioritises more user-generated content and video.’⁵ The perceived fragility of search and Google Discover traffic helps explain why many news publishers have moved on from measuring audience reach as a key success metric, instead prioritising the depth of engagement with a smaller, more loyal audience.

Although total aggregator usage is significant in markets like the US and the UK, not all aggregators are the same and there is something importantly different about a user who has opted into and intentionally uses a dedicated news aggregator such as NewsBreak, compared to the more incidental nature of ‘drive-by’ traffic such as Google Discover, which is a passive experience that surfaces content automatically.

AI chatbots, a new frontier in intermediated news consumption

And what of AI, perhaps the most consequential disruption to the news industry since the launch of the iPhone in 2007? Over the past year, news outlets have been adopting generative AI features in much of their newsgathering and production, with an increasing number of audience-facing innovations. Although the mantra of ‘human in the loop’ remains for now, publishers are actively exploring ways of introducing AI more deeply into workflows and products.

In this year’s survey we looked specifically at a consumption aspect of the AI revolution, namely the usage of AI chatbots for news. Our data this year show fast rather than explosive growth in the use of AI chatbots for news. At the global level, weekly news usage has increased by 3pp from 7% to 10% of all audiences. (It is important to note again that these usage data relate specifically to the usage of dedicated, standalone AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google Gemini.)

The chart shows considerable variation in weekly news usage rates. Some countries have seen usage double to levels of more than 10%, but accessing AI chatbots for news tends to be less popular in the USA and Europe, with usage in the UK the lowest of any market in our survey at 4%. In general, the adoption of AI chatbots for news is higher in countries where search, social, aggregator, and video platform adoption is relatively high, and lower in countries where direct access remains popular. In this sense, AI chatbot news use follows the pattern of platformisation that we have documented in past reports.

One factor likely to be affecting adoption of AI chatbots for news is perceived trustworthiness, itself probably influenced by the tone of media coverage about AI generally. Trust in answers from AI chatbots is 20% globally (relative to trust in news overall at 37%). In the UK the corresponding figure is 6%, also the lowest of any market.

People who are using AI chatbots for news are a highly engaged, digitally sophisticated segment of the news audience: 38% of people using AI chatbots fall into our ‘news lover’ segment, compared to 22% of respondents overall. They are characterised by the intensity and breadth of their news consumption, being far more likely to access multiple outlets, use a wide range of platforms and formats, and actively seek out information rather than encountering it passively. Their behaviour suggests strong familiarity with digital tools, reflected in higher use of search engines, messaging apps, and video platforms. They also appear more open to alternative sources of news, including individual journalists and news influencers, rather than relying solely on traditional institutional brands. AI chatbot users for news are best understood as ‘power news consumers’ generally – curious, experimental, with complex, multi-platform news diets. These characteristics can be seen when looking at people’s motivations for using AI chatbots. Individuals with higher underlying interest in news particularly like the ability to compile stories from different news outlets into a single response, to ask follow-up questions for more in-depth information or explanation, and being able to translate news from other languages.

After more than a decade of seeing news consumption shift from on-platform traffic to third-party search and social platforms, established news providers are concerned about whether the use of AI chatbots for news will make it even harder to attract audiences to owned news properties (and hence engage and monetise them directly). This is another aspect of the ‘Google Zero’ issue described earlier; specifically, will audiences be satisfied with the answers they get to news questions on AI chatbots and therefore be less likely to embark on onward journeys to owned news sites? We sought to investigate this by asking respondents about their behaviour in terms of clicking through from search engines, social media platforms, and AI chatbots to original news sources. (It is worth remembering this may be an area where there are differences between what people say they do and their actual behaviour.)

Overall, 42% of AI chatbot users for news say they always or often click through from chatbot answers to original news sources but there are wide variations by market. Clicking through is most popular in South Korea (56%), more than twice the reported click-through behaviour in Denmark (26%). Propensity for clicking through from AI chatbots seems to sit between likelihood of clicking through from social media (36%) and search (44%), but these numbers should be compared with caution because they are proportions of quite different user bases.

We also asked why people click through from the search engines, social media platforms, and AI chatbots. For every platform the most commonly cited reason is that they wanted more detail about the underlying story, but AI chatbot users are relatively less likely to say this compared to search and social, perhaps because the AI response has already satisfied their needs. AI users are also relatively more likely to want to verify the story and find out more about the source, which probably indicates a degree of caution and scepticism about the technology. This can be contrasted with audiences wanting extra, which is more common with search and social click-throughs, though the differences between platforms, at 9pp or less, are quite small.

What do people think about the news?

What are respondents telling us this year about their attitudes towards the news in terms of indicators such as trust, interest in the news, and worries about misinformation? And how are changing attitudes related to changing patterns of consumption?

Interest in news and news avoidance

At least part of the drift away from TV news and owned news websites and apps towards third-party sources is likely to be down to falling interest in news overall. For 46 of our markets we can compare the percentage of people in each country who say they are either extremely or very interested in the news with data from 2021. These numbers show that, on average, interest in news has fallen by 13 percentage points (from 59% to just under 46%) since the height of the pandemic.

The chart shows very significant reductions in the proportion of people who say they are extremely or very interested in the news, including in some markets which have previously had more stable levels of interest. These reductions of popular interest in news have democratic as well as commercial implications, making it harder to engage citizens in the political process as well as increasing the challenge of successfully monetising attention to the news, whether through advertising or by way of reader revenue.

As we have seen, social media and video networks are now the most widely used source of news globally, but there are differences by platform in terms of the degree of intent people have in seeking out news on them. X and YouTube are the only two networks where more than half of users say they think of these platforms as useful ways of getting the news. On Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok most people say they generally only see news when they are online for other reasons. The incidental nature of news consumption when people are on social media and video networks is a significant factor.

We segment our respondents into three groups according to their self-reported frequency of consuming news and interest in it: ‘news lovers’, ‘daily briefers’, and ‘casual users’. Since 2021 the proportion of news lovers has fallen from 29% to 22% of respondents overall, while casual users have increased from 16% to 25% of the survey. Asia is the region where the change in the mix of these segments has been the greatest. North America has seen the least change over the past five years. In some individual markets, including South Korea (24%), Japan (30%), Australia (22%), and Canada (23%), the share of news lovers is actually unchanged.

Even though in many markets the incidence of news lovers has fallen, indicators of engagement such as interest in politics, use of owned news websites and apps, and trust in news (see below) have held up better in this segment than for the population overall. For commercial news publishers pursuing differentiated strategies aimed at particular audience groups, this finding points to the continued existence of smaller, but still attractive, addressable segments.

A corollary of falling interest in news is avoiding the news at least some of the time. Overall, news avoidance has not changed in 2026 and is essentially flat at 42% year-on-year (for reference, the figure stood at 29% in 2017 when we began measuring it). In four countries – Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, and Turkey – 60% or more of the population now say they avoid the news sometimes or often. And in some other countries there were marked changes. Two of the biggest year-on-year increases in news avoidance were in Denmark (up by 7pp) and Norway (up by 9pp). The crisis over the future of Greenland, which escalated quickly during fieldwork ahead of the World Economic Forum in Davos at the end of January, likely played a contributing role in news avoidance here. Norwegian news media also very extensively covered two scandals involving Crown Princess Mette-Marit this year and this may have proved too much for some audiences.

Proportion who say they sometimes or often avoid the news

All markets

Q1di_2017. Do you find yourself actively trying to avoid news these days? Base: Total sample across all markets = 97,520. Note: Sample size in each individual market ≈ 2,000.

Trust in news

Perhaps the best illustration of the unease caused by turbulent world affairs are this year’s data on trust in news. The proportion of respondents who say they trust news most of the time fell significantly this year (down by 3pp). Having held steady at 40% for three years, the percentage of people globally saying they trust news overall dropped to 37%, the lowest figure since we started measuring trust in 2015. Out of our 48 markets, 29 reported significant falls in trust in news this year. Several countries showed particularly marked drops: trust fell by 5pp or more in 19 markets.

How should we interpret such volatile sentiment about the trust in news? Are news organisations to blame, or is something else going on?

Some factors seem to be at play beyond journalism itself. It is difficult precisely to disentangle declining trust in news organisations from broader scepticism about political and social institutions, but there has been a long-term international trend of falling trust in representative institutions such as governments and political parties, with a notable decline in trust for parliaments following the 2008 financial crisis (Valgarðsson et al. 2025). Other external indicators such as the Edelman Trust Barometer (which reports a 16pp net fall in trust in national government leaders this year for example)⁶ suggest that factors affecting institutional trust overall – including the actions of political leaders – may play an important role in shaping attitudes towards the news.

In countries with some of the biggest drops in trust such as the Philippines, Thailand, Peru, and Poland, recent events point to a likely sense of deterioration in the broader information environment. Political instability, divisive elections, and a noisier and more fragmented information environment seem to be shared characteristics of markets where trust in news has fallen most. Some of the reductions are almost certainly a consequence of direct attacks on news outlets and individual journalists, with a cumulative effect of undermining confidence in journalism overall. Reflecting its deepening political divides and sustained political pressure on the news domain, trust in news in the US is now the seventh lowest in our survey, falling another 5pp this year to 25% overall. Among politically right-leaning Americans, trust in news sits at just 15% – very nearly the lowest reported figure for any left/centre/right political demographic in any country covered by the Digital News Report (only 14% of people in Greece on the political left trust news overall).

None of this is to suggest that trust in news is unrelated to what news organisations themselves do. But increasing concerns about the information environment overall are more likely this year to explain the fall in trust. Looking at the five countries where trust in news fell the most this year, the reductions in overall trust are much larger than change in trust ratings for any individual news brand.

Influence on the news

If audience concerns are indeed less about individual news brands and more about the trustworthiness of the news media sector generally, what are some of the relevant forces shaping these overall perceptions? In 26 markets we asked respondents how influential they perceive six different groups to be in terms of their impact on the news (these groups were politicians, experts, organised crime groups, advertisers, activists/advocacy groups, and media owners). Unsurprisingly, politicians and government officials are the group most thought to have influence on the news, but the owners of news media companies themselves are also considered to have a significant bearing on news output.

In the USA and Australia, for example, this influence on the part of media owners is felt to be more significant than the leverage enjoyed by any other group.

Of the six potentially influential groups we asked about, there were four where respondents widely perceived high degrees of influence: government officials and politicians, media owners, organised crime, and experts. (In the case of experts, we were interested in places where audiences identify a notable lack of influence by experts on the news.) In the next chart we have included the countries where net influence scores (the difference between people who considered each group to be influential and not influential) were highest. There are some countries where net perceptions of potentially problematic influence are high for each of these groups. In the case of Serbia and Slovakia,⁷ respondents were among the most concerned anywhere about the influence of all four of these groups. In countries where people perceive high levels of influence on the news from groups such as politicians, media owners, and organised crime (and little impact from experts), it is reasonable to expect some association with trust in news overall.⁸ Serbia and Slovakia both feature in the group of five markets where trust in news overall is lowest.
 

Journalism should be impartial and objective, however this does not happen as media outlets are owned by politically motivated people or entities and used for a specific agenda. The narrative is distorted or manipulated to meet that subjective end. 

Female, 65, Australia (answer to open-ended question)

Top five markets where net perception of influence of each on news media is highest

Q_undue. Thinking about the news media in your country … how influential, or not, do you think each of the following is on news coverage? Base: Total sample in each market ≈ 2,000. Note: Based on percentage point difference between influential and not influential.

There is also a more direct link between trust in news and the falling prominence of traditional sources of news. A downward impact on trust in news overall as third-party platform consumption increases is to be expected because of the ‘trust gap’. The trust gap exists because trust in news consumed via third-party platforms is substantially lower than trust in news overall.

On a global level, trust in news on social media and from AI chatbots stands at 22% and 20% respectively (trust in answers to news queries on search engines is significantly higher). As we have seen, trust in news overall has fallen to 37% while a significant change in the make-up of news usage has been unfolding, with audiences relying less on print, broadcast, and ‘owned’ online properties and more on news they consume on third-party platforms. If the composition of news consumption continues to move in favour of discovery on social media, video networks, and AI as it has done in 2026, a decline in overall trust is, at least in part, an expected outcome because news on these platforms is less trusted than the legacy forms of news people are drifting away from.

News is less trusted on social media in part because of worries about the prevalence of false or misleading information. The proportion concerned about fake news online more broadly has also risen this year to a figure of 62% of respondents globally (up 4pp).

Worries about fake news and misinformation remain highest in Nigeria and Kenya, followed by the UK, Australia, and Portugal. A distinct regional shift is evident with respect to worries about what is real and what is fake on the internet – in every single Western European market concern about fake news increased by at least 4pp this year, rising to a 7pp increase in Norway, 8pp in the Netherlands, and 9pp in Belgium as worries about deepfakes, AI slop, politically motivated misinformation, and the wider social implications of these networks escalated over the past year.

Putting the different elements together, a picture emerges of growing centrality of social media and video networks for news due to the declines in the use of more traditional online and offline sources, even as audiences consider the information they discover on these third-party networks to be less reliable. Political instability, increasing social division, and pressure towards polarisation are inclining audiences to take less interest in the news and to spend less time with traditional sources of it such as TV, radio, and news organisations’ own websites and apps. For growing proportions, social media are emerging as the main source of information – but this may well not be because these platforms are a conscious preference and more because they are people’s default exposure to news and current affairs.

Audiences have a keen sense of these environments being less trustworthy, while continuing to rely on them because they remain the most convenient places to encounter other types of information. It is also important to bear in mind that, outside of news, people generally have a positive view of third-party platforms. Data we reported from eight countries in 2024 showed a net positive view of video networks everywhere we asked. The picture is more mixed for social media (respondents in all markets except Germany said on balance social media were positive for them personally, but the net effect was only thought to be positive in three of the eight markets) (Ejaz et al. 2024). This picture of prioritising convenience over confidence helps to explain why trust holds up in leading news brands even though trust overall is falling.
 

I knew already that I got some of my news from Instagram, but I didn’t realise the extent, like, the full extent to which I rely on Instagram for news.

Female, 28, UK, News Definitions project

People’s trust in these individual news outlets is, as we have seen, generally little affected, but their consumption of news from these sources is increasingly intermediated and diluted through the liked, but less trusted, third-party networks where they spend most of their time online.

Coverage of big stories

In addition to trust, we also asked respondents to judge how well the news media in their country had performed in its coverage of six long-running international stories: inflation and the cost of living, migration/immigration, Donald Trump’s second presidency, climate change, and the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East (this question was asked before the Iran war began).

Audience attitudes to coverage of these stories varied by region and country, but there is no story where audiences (globally averaged) believe that news media are doing a good job. In the United States and in several European countries especially, net sentiment indicates that audiences do not believe news media are doing a good job on several of these stories. On the most divisive topics – particularly climate, immigration, and the conflict in Gaza – many audiences feel poorly served by existing coverage. Audiences in Norway tend to have a more positive view of the coverage of these big stories, although immigration stands out there as the issue where, relatively at least, audiences are least happy.

Respondents’ overall trust in news is closely associated with whether individuals consider the news media to be doing a good job on these big stories. Taking France as an example, people who say they do not trust news generally rate the news media as doing a bad job on each of the topics we asked about, with broadly the same relative ranking as the population overall. More than half of people who do not trust news in France (net -56pp) think news media are doing a bad job when it comes to covering immigration. Conversely, people who generally trust news tend to think news media are in fact covering each of these big stories well, with one notable exception – immigration.

Some interesting differences emerge when looking at the data by political leaning. In the UK, although most of the political momentum for policy change has come from the right, it is audiences on the left who are actually most unhappy about coverage of immigration. However, people on the right are also dissatisfied with the coverage, and more so than for any other topic, highlighting how fraught it is for the news media to cover.

These questions about big stories allow another illustration of the trust gap. Dissatisfaction about coverage is especially pronounced when people encounter news about these issues on social media. Looking at the Spanish data, among audiences for whom social media and video networks are their main source of news, attitudes are net negative for all of the big stories. Relatively speaking at least, audiences express improved levels of satisfaction if their main source of news is established online news sites and apps and are net positive about three of the six stories if their main source is TV news. These differences play out at the global level also, where people who use social media and video networks as their main source of news are more negative about coverage on each of the six stories.

The continued rise of video networks

We have already seen how social media and video networks are playing a bigger role in news consumption overall. To be more specific, the story is largely about the growing significance of video networks – Instagram and TikTok – alongside the more established role of YouTube.

In the five years since the pandemic, the percentage of global respondents saying they use TikTok for any purpose has grown from 15% to 37%. Although Instagram’s growth has been slower than that of TikTok, Instagram is substantially bigger overall, with 53% of respondents globally saying they use Instagram for any purpose. This growth for TikTok and Instagram should not, however, obscure the fact that YouTube remains comfortably the biggest video-led network, with usage rates above 60% of all respondents globally throughout this decade. YouTube (69% this year) and Facebook (67%) have been neck and neck for the past five years.

These data reflecting the rise of these video-led networks echoes other analysis which has pointed to social media networks becoming less social. In October last year, John Burn-Murdoch at the Financial Times wrote, ‘We have now witnessed the transformation of social media into anti-social media with the progressive disappearance of most people from active participation on the platforms and the steady displacement of real-world interactions by scrolling.’⁹ As a result of people participating less actively on social media, less content is user-generated by people within networks. (See also Ofcom’s 2026 media use and attitudes research for the UK.¹⁰)

Similar growth patterns are evident at the global level when looking at the use of social media and video networks for news.

Zooming out to look back to when we started tracking data for these platforms, we can identify three different groups (note that data in the chart above are for a basket of 12 markets for which data is available over the period): WhatsApp, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram have enjoyed sustained growth since 2014. Facebook, long the market leader, had been declining slowly but seems to have enjoyed a resurgence this year – again this may be due to Meta’s decision to increase the volume of news content on the platform. Increases in news consumption for Facebook this year are especially pronounced among respondents aged 45 and above, with no statistically significant growth among those aged 18–24. Three platforms, X, Snapchat, and Facebook Messenger have not seen their usage for news change much since 2014.

Although TikTok’s role as a platform for news is more limited in markets like the US (10%) and the UK (7%), its impact elsewhere is much bigger. More than half of respondents in Thailand and Kenya use TikTok for news, with usage rates also above 40% in Peru, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

Even higher usage for news is reported in countries such as India and Kenya for YouTube¹¹, a more mature platform which has grown less since 2021, but remains by some distance the biggest video network for news around the world.

Among younger audiences, the more recent momentum has been with Instagram, which is now the biggest social platform for news among those aged 18–24, reaching 42% of this age group. The usage of X for news fell this year among 18–24s to 15%.

For social media and video networks in the USA, the biggest change this year is a drop by 7pp in the use of X for news, although it is worth remembering that 2025’s data will reflect a hectic news period in the USA, including Donald Trump’s inauguration and Elon Musk’s time leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), as it was called. The 2026 figure is roughly the same as for past years other than 2025. Leaving 2025 aside, the broader post-pandemic trend is that news audiences for X have grown on the political right and fallen among those on the left, although there is no question that X remains highly influential overall, particularly in the realms of politics, media, and public affairs. Looking ahead, how TikTok’s fortunes in the USA are affected by its sale to a US-led consortium will be something to watch in 2027 – the platform appears to have lost some of its popularity among American users in the run-up to the sale.

As the usage of video-led networks such as TikTok and Instagram grows, alongside the existing scale and reach of YouTube, so we should expect the consumption of news video online to grow accordingly. We reported last year on the shifting format preferences in many markets towards video and this shows no signs of stopping in 2026, although there are variations by platform in terms of where this growth is happening.

Globally, 77% of respondents now say they consume online news video. There were large year-on-year increases in markets such as Denmark (up 9pp), Australia (up 7pp), and Portugal (up 6pp). As a result of growth in Germany and the UK¹², another significant milestone was reached this year. For the first time, a majority of respondents now say they watch news online in every single market we cover, whether on news websites and apps or on social media and video networks.

As the popularity of online news video grows and the reach of broadcast television news wanes, watching news online has now overtaken watching TV news almost everywhere. This line was crossed in the United Kingdom in 2026, meaning the UK joins 44 other markets where this shift has already occurred. Broadcast TV news is still watched by more people than online news video in only three markets – the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany. It should be remembered that this is a measure of the proportion of people who say they watch news online and on TV each week – actual minutes watched may well still be higher for television news. We should also keep in mind that our online survey data slightly over-represents online use, and under-represents offline use, and more so in markets with relatively low levels of internet penetration.

-10pp

fall in on-site news publisher video consumption since 2021

Crucially, growth in online video is overwhelmingly taking place on third-party platforms. Despite strong audience appetite for digital video, established news organisations have struggled to capture a commensurate share of this viewing on their own properties. At a global level, watching video on owned and operated news websites and apps in fact fell last year by 5pp to 23%. Despite the prominent role that the enthusiasm for online video has played in driving the growth of video networks, it is striking that video consumption on news websites and apps is falling in absolute terms. (It is important to acknowledge that we cannot capture the share of third-party video consumption which is accounted for by content from established news media in our research – for some publishers this will have been growing significantly.)

Given the popularity of platforms like TikTok and Instagram, there has been lots of focus recently on short-form videos in particular, and many publisher video strategies have been focused on ‘shorts’.

Our data show that the duration of news videos watched differs markedly by platform, with TikTok evidently skewing towards videos of less than two minutes. YouTube supports a wider range of video durations, from short clips to full-length programmes. At the global level, 21% of respondents who say they access news on YouTube watch live news.

Importantly, the growth of online video is not purely a mobile phenomenon. As well as watching videos on smartphones, some people are also choosing to watch news video on their internet-connected smart TVs. In the United States, YouTube is now in direct competition for TV audience attention with both legacy cable TV groups like Warner Bros. Discovery as well as streaming giants such as Netflix. But this is not solely an American trend and several other apps offer both live and on-demand news in addition to YouTube (such as Haystack, Tubi, and Plex).

27%

globally watch on-demand news on smart TVs

Our data show that half of all respondents globally say they use a smart TV to watch news, whether broadcast or on-demand. Of news audiences across 27 markets, 27% say they are using third-party apps like YouTube and others to watch news on TV. This is of course a highly competitive, intermediated distribution channel, but is now a significant one for traditional TV news broadcasters to consider.

For further analysis on the role and implications of online video see Online news video: From broadcast news to streaming and platforms: the changing landscape of news video.

Creators at the forefront of the growth in online video

The shift from on-platform towards off-platform consumption of online news and towards the consumption of video on these third-party sites is accompanied, and partly fuelled by, the emergence of independent news creators or influencers (we use these terms interchangeably: Newman et al. 2025).

News influencers now play a visible role in the news landscape: 27% of respondents say they encountered news content from news influencers or creators in the past week. This figure reflects content from creators dedicated to producing news content (e.g. HugoDécrypte in France or Philip DeFranco in the USA). If we also include consumption of content from creators who are more broadly focused on entertainment but sometimes talk about current affairs (e.g. Penguinz0, a long-established YouTuber originally best known for gaming, now a more general internet commentator) the figure increases to 46%.

Creators seem to be most popular in global-majority countries, with markets in Asia, Africa, and Latin America generally making up the top ten. Impact so far is lowest in Europe and Japan, reflecting the fact that creator use is associated with use of social media and video networks for news (and this is lower in Europe and Japan). However, it is worth noting creator usage in line with the global average in European markets with significant press freedom challenges such as Hungary and Serbia, a reminder of the role creators can play as independent voices in countries where mainstream journalism operates under constraints.

Is this growth of creator news consumption coming at the expense of traditional news providers? Our data this year appear to suggest this is generally not the case. Most people who are getting news from creators are doing so in a way that is complementary to their existing news habits.

To inject some new data into the industry, academic, and policy debate about the rise of news influencers¹³, we asked questions this year to establish the scale of creator consumption for news, as measured in terms of the extent to which creator content meets audiences’ news needs. At the global level, of the 27% of respondents who say they consume news from creators who mainly focus on news, 47% of these people say that most or all of their news needs are met by these news creators. This equates to 13% of people globally who, at least in theory, feel mainly satisfied with news from creators alone (though in practice they may still be consuming news from other sources to go beyond their needs). 

The next chart shows wide variation. Assuming that people who do not use creators are having none of their needs met by them, in the Netherlands only 2% of people have most or all their news needs met by creators who mainly focus on news, rising to 19% in Mexico and as much as 34% among English-speaking online audiences in Nigeria. The other way of thinking about this 13% global average is that 87% of people around the world have none or only some of their news needs met by news-focused creators and mainly rely on other sources. Moreover, to reinforce the point about complementarity, reach for the online news brands we ask about in each market is higher among people who get some of their news from creators than it is for the population overall – this is true for markets where creator use is highest (Nigeria and Kenya) and also lowest (Denmark and the Netherlands).¹⁴

3%

Share of people who only get news from creators

The share of people globally who say they have all their news needs met by news-focused creators is currently only 3% and in practice these individuals might still be consuming other news sources.

News publishers are at pains to understand in detail what it is about creators which explains their recent popularity and what can be learned from them to increase the appeal of mainstream news to audiences, especially younger ones. We asked respondents this year how they think news from creators compares to traditional news providers.
 

If it’s just one YouTuber who shared something, I’m not as engaged. But if it’s someone who’s clearly done research and is talking about a specific topic, then I actually get more out of it. They often go deeper into one thing than traditional media does, because the news has to cover so many things at once.

Male, 28, Norway, News Definitions 

In headline terms, audiences tend to see creators as more entertaining and engaging, but less trustworthy and less impartial than established outlets – but there are important differences between respondent groups. When measured on the basis of all audiences, traditional outlets are considered stronger than creators in ‘core’ news values areas such as impartiality and trustworthiness. People who use creators for at least some of their news consumption have the same relative ranking for attributes but in fact prefer creators on each characteristic we asked about.
 

They share news, but they share it in a way that’s concise and easy to follow. I feel confident the information is correct, and it doesn’t feel like someone talking down to you. It’s more relatable than watching someone in a suit behind a desk. 

Female, 48, US, News Definitions

The creator landscape continues to evolve rapidly. There are considerable variations between markets, between types of creators, and people who consume them. The 3% of people who have all their needs met by creators are likely to be less interested in news overall and to rely on more partisan influencer voices. For the vast majority, however, creator consumption for now at least is a complementary rather than a substitutive practice and evidently there are lessons for legacy media in the formats, storytelling techniques, and modes of audience engagement that creators have refined.

This is a fast-moving part of the news media sector. High rates of entry into and exit from into the creator space are likely, reflecting the difficulty some individuals experience of sustaining high levels of content production, in adapting to platform changes, and building a viable business. At the same time the nature of the creator sector is changing; the most successful creators are professionalising, evolving from sole operators into small – and sometimes substantial – media businesses. This blurs the boundary between alternative and established media, as illustrated by the sale of Bari Weiss’s The Free Press to CBS for an estimated US$150m. And as big media brands such as Schibsted in the Nordics, the Daily Mail and the Independent in the UK, and the Washington Post and many others in the US set up their own ‘creator labs’, the dividing line between conventional and alternative news media will only become more blurred. In the words of Tyler Denk, CEO of popular email newsletter platform Beehiiv used by many news creators, ‘The creator use case and the enterprise use case are going to merge quicker than most people expect.’¹⁵

Paying for news

What does the shift in the balance of news consumption towards third-party platforms mean for the commercial prospects of news businesses that make reader revenue a strategic priority? Once again this year there is little change in the overall proportion of respondents who say they are paying for news, with 10–20% appearing to represent a ceiling in most markets – Norway (40%) and Sweden (32%) remain the outliers. Across the ‘pay basket’ of 20 countries we track (where paywalls are relatively common and the concept of paying for online news is understood), the percentage of people paying for news stayed roughly the same at 17% (compared to 18% in 2025). A large drop was recorded in Austria (-6pp), although this was largely a reversal of an unexpected increase in 2025, and there was a 4pp fall in the United States,¹⁶ and a 3pp reduction in Switzerland.

This stagnation of reader revenue growth in part will reflect the long-term decline in the use of owned news sites and apps, which have lost 12 percentage points of reach since 2021, shrinking the top of the subscription funnel. With fewer new visitors coming to sites, publishers are increasingly focused on retaining existing subscribers and ARPU (average revenue per user) optimisation in addition to exploring innovative ways – such as bundling – of attracting new subscribers. The Q4 2025 results of the New York Times indicate that the share of its subscribers just paying for access to news fell from 17% to 12% last year.¹⁷ The majority pay for a bundle which includes other content, like puzzles and cooking.

Ireland and Australia are the only two countries outside the Nordics where more than 20% of people now pay for news. They are also the two countries where paying for news has grown the most since 2020, up by 10pp and 9pp respectively. This progress in Ireland is at least partly explained by a ‘market move’ of all four of the major quality Irish newspapers over the past decade to introduce paid models. The achievement of Nordic levels of paying for news in Ireland is notable given that free content from not just one but two public service media entities (RTÉ and the BBC) features in the top five online news sources in Ireland.

When we ask people if they pay for access to online news we also ask those who say ‘yes’ to tell us about the forms of payment for access, including whether individuals get access for free – either as part of a bundle with something else, or because in fact somebody else paid. It is important to remember that people could select more than one option. The data show a wide range of answers. For example, in the UK – a market where 10% of people say they pay for news – we find the highest percentage (66%) of people on our survey who say they pay by way of ongoing subscription or membership and the lowest percentage (7%) of people who say that they have made a one-off payment to access news. The Netherlands is where the highest share of people say they get online access as part of a print subscription, while France is where the largest percentage of people say they get free access as part of something else such as a broadband subscription. Norway is the market where the highest share of people say that someone else paid for their access and it is in Canada where the highest proportion say they have made a one-off payment for news and it is also the highest in terms of making donations to support a digital news service – this final data point is likely to be related to people’s motivations to pay for news (see below).

Although paying for news is not growing in most places at the headline level, we wanted to understand more about the diversity of reader revenue by asking respondents about the types of organisations they have a paying relationship with. Among those who pay for online news, 56% across the 20 markets in our pay basket pay money to a traditional news organisation, but there are notable variations – in the UK, 80% of all reader revenue goes to this type of news business. Although the total level of paying for news is relatively low in the UK, it seems that established news brands have been relatively successful in capturing a high share of people willing to pay for news and, as mentioned above, getting people to pay ongoing subscriptions or memberships.

In neighbouring France the corresponding figure for the share of reader revenue going to traditional media is only 39%. France (34%) is one of a number of countries (Australia is another at 35%) where financial support for digital-born online news outlets is significantly higher than the average – Mediapart is probably the best-known example, with almost 250,000 subscribers.¹⁸ In line with the popularity of aggregators generally in east Asia, paying relationships with aggregators are relatively high in Japan (34%), and in South Korea and Hong Kong around half of respondents who pay for news pay for aggregators.

When it comes to individuals generating at least some of their revenue from audience members, this is an area of the news creator domain where text plays a bigger role than video (YouTube and TikTok creators tend to rely on a mix of advertising revenue shares, direct sponsorships, and paid promotions). For news creators and commentators, platforms such as Substack and Beehiiv offer a route to reader revenue income, and in markets like Canada (29%) and the United States (21%) above-average percentages of people pay individuals. Some of the most successful in this category include Heather Cox Richardson, with more than 2.5 million Substack subscribers,¹⁹ and Aaron Parnas, who has successfully leveraged a large footprint on TikTok to a paid relationship with over 615,000 subscribers on Substack.²⁰

We tried to understand more about motivations this year by asking respondents why they pay for news. The most popular response on average was perhaps the most obvious one (‘to get useful content I can’t access any other way’), underscoring the imperative of genuinely distinctive, unique content for publishers’ revenue strategies. Other common personal or transactional motivations for paying included having ‘access to content I like to consume as a pastime’. But social or values-based rationales also play a role – the second most popular motivation was ‘to support journalism because I think it is important to society’. Of people paying for news, 46% said these social or values-based motivations were part of their motivation for paying. Intriguingly, the Nordic markets, which are in the leading group of countries where people pay for news, all feature among the markets where ‘supporting journalism because I think it is important to society’ ranks lowest as a motivation. These Nordic markets are much more likely to cite direct benefits as their rationale for paying for news.

It is interesting to draw a contrast between the two countries which sit at opposite ends of the motivational spectrum – Finland and Canada. In Finland, paying for news is overwhelmingly driven by direct personal benefits. Of people paying for news, 86% cite at least one direct benefit and a majority (52%) specifically say they pay to get access to content they cannot find elsewhere. By contrast, social or values-based motivations are relatively weak. In Finland, paying for news is understood primarily as a functional transaction – a way to secure access to valuable or exclusive content.

Canada presents a different picture, one with a much stronger role of social and values-based motivations. Of Canadians paying for news, 63% cite at least one social motive, nearly double Finland’s level. This divergence suggests a structural difference: in Finland, payment is necessary and habitual, people describe it in terms of utility. In Canada, where paying is about half the level of Finland’s overall, payment may be a more conscious, value-laden choice, leading people to articulate it in civic and moral terms rather than purely practical ones.

Finally, it is useful to remember how more-engaged paying audiences differ from society on average. Although paying for news probably does not cause these differences, in the UK as an example, people who pay for news are more concerned about fake news, less likely to avoid the news, and more likely to consume at least some news from creators. People who pay for news in the UK have a more positive attitude than average to the BBC, trust the BBC more, and use the BBC more both online and broadcast than the typical Briton.

This year’s findings point to a reader revenue market that is no longer expanding in aggregate, but continues to evolve dynamically. For many publishers, subscriber volumes are no longer growing significantly, with revenue gains increasingly driven by pricing and product mix rather than new subscriber acquisition. The USA Today Co. provides a concrete example of this focus on increasing average revenue per user – they reported a drop of total subscribers of 30% during 2025, while seeing ARPU increase by 27% over the same period as a result of churn reduction measures such as an end to heavy discounting.²¹ In short, the ceiling on paying for news may not be rising, but the ways in which value is created within that ceiling are becoming more varied. And although usage of owned and operated news properties may be declining, it is likely that those traffic reductions are concentrated among infrequent users least likely to convert to paying audience members.

Beneath the low growth headline the picture is certainly more nuanced. Some major news companies such as News Corp Australia, the Globe & Mail (Canada), and Le Monde (France) continue to enjoy sustained reader revenue momentum.²² Several smaller and mid-sized publishers are also reporting growth in paying audiences. In Central and Eastern Europe, highly focused pay strategies have been successfully executed by companies like Dennik N (Slovakia) and Telegram (Croatia), while The Mill Media in the UK has built a network of local titles supported primarily by reader revenue, reaching around 13,000 paying subscribers for local news across six cities.

What emerges from this year’s data is a market characterised less by uniform growth than by increasing differentiation. A few publishers are succeeding by focusing on scale, others through depth of engagement, and others still through a strong sense of mission or identity. The challenge remains how to sustain and deepen relationships with audiences in an environment where overall willingness to pay is no longer growing. In that context, this year’s numbers are perhaps best understood not as a single narrative about success or failure, but as a set of signals about the different ways in which reader revenue can take shape across markets, products, and audiences.

Do people still believe in impartial news?

Despite unease with both the state of the world and the way it is reported, audiences continue to endorse core journalistic values. This year we revisited attitudes towards impartiality and asked people whether they prefer news which doesn’t have a particular point of view, news that shares their point of view, or news that challenges their point of view.
 

News should be without points of view and without any bias so that each person can form their own judgement.

Female, 56, Mexico (answer to open-ended question)

Opinions about this aspect of impartiality are little changed from when we last asked this question six years ago (there is a 3pp drop from 51% to 48% among people who think it is preferable to consume news that does not have a particular point of view), suggesting enduring support for this ideal even as consumption habits evolve and polarising pressures continue to have an effect. Interestingly, the proportion of people saying they prefer news that shares their point of view fell by 4pp to 20% – in part because more people now respond with ‘don’t know’.

In addition to asking about personal preferences, we also asked people this year whether they believe others in society should consume news from sources that do not take sides. A clear plurality believes that a news diet drawn from non-partisan sources is desirable, both for the individuals themselves and for others.

I prefer news sources that align with my point of view because they save time, reduce confusion, and help me focus on information that fits my values and goals. I believe others should do the same, as it keeps people engaged and allows them to make clearer, more confident decisions, while still being open to other perspectives when necessary.

Male, 31, UK (answer to open-ended question)

Nevertheless, some variations emerge if we look at the data by political leaning. Under this analysis, respondents on both the left and right of the political spectrum in both the US and the UK show a somewhat greater preference for news from sources which share their point of view, with people on the right in these two countries showing relatively lower support for news which does not have a particular point of view. But these variations are not universal. In Japan, people on the left show relatively lower support for news which does not take sides.

Attitudes towards news from public service media and its social impact

We asked respondents in 26 countries with established public service media (PSM) whether public service news has a positive or negative effect on life in their country. Overall, across the 26 countries the net attitude is favourable. A combined 37% of respondents think PSM news has a positive effect, 22% in aggregate think the effect is negative. It is important to note that 35% of people consider PSM news to have neither a positive nor negative effect, reflecting the fact that many people are ambivalent, consider the effect to be negligible compared to other forces in society, or perhaps do not think very much about the issue.

Across the 26 countries there was a wide variation in national sentiment, however. When looking at the percentage point difference between people who are positive and negative, net positive views about the effect of PSM news on society is strongest in four Nordic markets, plus Portugal (42% net positive, with 53% positive and 11% negative) where television news remains notably popular as a source of news, and overall trust in news is high. At 28pp, net positivity is also high in Switzerland (42% positive, 14% negative) where a referendum to dramatically cut funding to the Swiss public service broadcaster, SRG SSR, was recently rejected.

Three groups of markets emerged from the analysis, as shown below. One group includes countries like Finland and Australia which show significant overall net positivity for the social impact of public service news. In another group, including the UK and the Czech Republic, views on the effect of PSM news on society are mixed overall, even though most respondents in those two countries see news from PSM brands as trustworthy (see our section on Analysis by country and market). And in a third group where trust in news ranges from 19 to 32%, more respondents believe that public service news has a negative impact on national life than say it has a positive impact. This group includes France and Slovakia.

Trust in news overall seems to be closely associated with attitudes towards the social impact of public service news. Another important factor is engagement in news. In places where interest in news and politics is higher, where people consume news frequently and from a wide range of sources, respondents are more likely to have a positive view of the social effect of public service news. Recent events within the public service media organisations themselves play a role too. In the five markets where there is a net negative attitude towards the effect of PSM news on society there have been significant episodes of, to varying degrees, organisational upheaval, funding reductions, and external pressure from politicians or other influential actors.

There is one dividing line which stands out as a differentiating factor: political leaning. Responses in several markets illustrate the contested position of public service journalism in a more fragmented and politicised media environment.

In several countries, including ones where attitudes overall are positive as well as ones where attitudes are net negative, there are marked differences in net positivity depending on where people place themselves on the political spectrum. In general, right-leaning respondents are the group most likely to take a negative view of the effect of news from public service media, but this is not always the case. In Italy, for example, negative views are more pronounced among those on the political left.

Large differences in attitude between those on the left and right of the political spectrum, including countries such as Germany and the UK with large and highly trusted PSM news providers, underscore the challenge faced by organisations such as ARD/ZDF and the BBC/ITN to convince audiences that commitments to inclusion and representation of a range of viewpoints are being upheld. This is a point acknowledged by individuals like Deborah Turness, former CEO of BBC News, who said in February of this year, ‘Do I think that the BBC newsrooms would, in percentage terms, vote the same way as the nation right now in the UK in terms of the Reform party, which is quite an extreme conservative movement, very anti-immigration, [and is] really gathering steam? No, I don't. What that means is you have to work even harder to maintain that impartiality.’²³

Conclusions

Previous editions of the Digital News Report have described a news media sector in a state of flux, but in 2026 the data suggest a heightened sense of volatility, reflecting a widespread mood of unease among large parts of the public. There is no single explanation for this. Some of the drivers lie beyond journalism itself: geopolitical tensions, shifting norms of political leadership, and the erosion of long-held assumptions all play a part. At the same time, patterns of media use continue to change rapidly, reshaping how attention is distributed and who is able to capture it.

Sandwiched between this political and social turbulence, journalists and news media organisations endeavour to report on dizzying events and to engage audiences despite a growing sense of dissatisfaction, and sometimes hostility, in many countries both from politicians and from some sections of the public (see the photo above).

The continued drift away from traditional sources of news can lead news organisations to battle for a share of attention in the places where audience intent and loyalty are lowest, and the prospects for monetisation are most challenging. Many publishers are starting to reflect on what their social media strategy is actually yielding, while at the same time focusing on how to maximise the engagement and value of the smaller but more loyal audience which continues to read, watch, and listen to news organisations’ own outlets.

How to respond to the rapid development and diffusion of generative AI is the biggest 360-degree challenge for today’s news leaders and policymakers. As our data show, the use of AI chatbots is growing fast, but use for news is not growing as quickly as use of AI tools more widely. This perhaps creates a small window of opportunity to work through some of the thorny distribution dilemmas about whether to allow AI platforms access to publisher content and, if so, how to be compensated for the value this brings to the AI chatbot experience. Initiatives to achieve leverage by working collaboratively to engage with the AI companies are likely to become more popular. What specifically to license to AI chatbots is another emerging question – although some people are using chatbots like alternative search engines, the consumer use cases are becoming more varied, meaning that trying to drive click-throughs to article URLs may well not be the only thing to focus on and develop.

At a time when audience growth can seem so elusive, news creators have found a way of achieving it. Capitalising on growing audience enthusiasm for online video content in a way which seems to have passed publishers by, a quarter of audiences are now getting at least some news content from creators who focus on news. It may be tempting for institutional news media to regard these creators as a new threat, but for most audiences these creators are complementary voices, adding freshness and colour to people’s existing news experience. Established news organisations can utilise the opportunity to learn from what audiences value about the best news creators. For their part, the most successful creators are learning that – for better or worse – they are now running news businesses themselves, with all the challenges that come with the territory. We might expect more collaboration between legacy news media and these emerging news producers as they explore ways of working together for mutual benefit.

To think positively about the anxious sentiments evident in this year’s data, people continue to care about the news and news values. Although there is plenty of noise from partisan commentators about the death of impartiality, we find a quieter mainstream of opinion still in favour of news which does not take sides. This opinion is an expression of both personal preference as well as an expression of what is good for society overall.

Politicians and policymakers have important parts to play. As we have seen, people are highly sensitive about perceptions of government officials and politicians influencing the news. For those grappling with legislative and regulatory questions, the challenge is likely to be one of striking the right balance between a darkening public mood about the impact of social media while people at the same time become more reliant on it for their news and information. 

Trust and interest in news are falling, concerns about misinformation are rising, but at the same time a number of individual news brands are highly and broadly trusted, standing out against an abundance of content, and connecting with their target audiences. Their success, as well as appreciation of the contributions of a growing number of news creators, are a reminder that people still care about what news and journalism – in new shapes and some traditional forms – has to offer, and that the opportunity for news organisations is to ask how they can play a positive role in the lives of their audiences. As we have said before, the answer is unlikely to lie in producing more content or in peppering people’s lockscreens with yet more notifications. In a more questioning age, simply telling people what to believe probably belongs to a more hierarchical past. But news organisations can play a vital role helping people make sense of seismic change in the world at large and in brokering and facilitating trust in societies and neighbourhoods where people may feel there is sometimes more which divides them than they have in common.

Footnotes

¹  The gap between the use of social media and video networks (54%) and television (52%) is just 2pp and should be interpreted with caution. However, the trend line shows a clear move away from television as a source of news over time, with no such decline evident for social media and video networks. 

² https://pressgazette.co.uk/media-audience-and-business-data/media_metrics/facebook-referral-traffic-news-social-2025/ 

³ When talking about AI use for news in this report we generally mean the intentional use of standalone AI chatbots for news discovery and not AI Mode or AI Overview answers to search queries. In most cases, AI answers are not enabled by Google for news searches.

⁴ Percentages for people using radio, newspapers, podcasts, and newsletters as their main source of Iran news range from 1 to 5% and are not shown in the chart.

⁵ https://pressgazette.co.uk/media_business/plunging-google-discover-traffic-hits-reach-digital-revenue/

⁶ https://www.edelman.com/trust/2026/trust-barometer

⁷ Slovakia ranks sixth in terms of perceptions of influence of media owners.

⁸ The interplay between political and media ownership influence is described by Schiffrin (2021).

⁹ https://www.ft.com/content/a0724dd9-0346-4df3-80f5-d6572c93a863

¹⁰ https://www.ofcom.org.uk/media-use-and-attitudes/media-habits-adults/passive-social-media-use-ai-companionship-and-online-side-hustles-uk-adults-media-and-online-lives-revealed

¹¹ Note that TikTok is banned in India.

¹² Prior to 2026, consumption of online video was last measured in Germany in 2023 when the figure was 45%.

¹³ E.g. in Spain an updated law on ‘rectification’ (the right of an individual to have false or inaccurate information about them corrected by the person or organisation that publishes it), which includes online influencers with large followings, is currently going through the legislative process. 

¹⁴ With the exception of Ekstra Bladet online in Denmark.

¹⁵ https://www.therebooting.com/p/email-as-infrastructure

¹⁶ The original fieldwork produced a figure of 13% for the United States. We did a separate repoll in March 2026 and the figure was 16%. We use the 16% figure here, but the 13% may appear in other reports. Year-on-year changes should be interpreted with caution as they may be the result of the uncertainty and error associated with survey sampling.

¹⁷ https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2026/03/The-New-York-Times-Company-2025-Annual-Report.pdf

¹⁸ https://www.20minutes.fr/arts-stars/medias/4142978-20250311-mediapart-site-investigation-annee-2024-celle-tous-records

¹⁹ https://time.com/collections/time100-creators-2025/7299128/heather-cox-richardson/

²⁰ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Parnas

²¹ https://pressgazette.co.uk/paywalls/biggest-subscription-news-websites-2026/

²² https://flashesandflames.com/2025/07/10/le-monde-booms-by-adding-journos/

²³ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2026/02/26/deborah-turness-dismisses-bbc-trump-scandal-bad-edit/