Germany
The German news landscape is characterised by two strong public broadcasters and numerous private national and regional news offerings on TV, radio, print, and online. A reformed PSB-treaty requires public broadcasters to make significant financial savings and the decline in circulation of daily newspapers continues. While the printed editions continue to lose readers, digital subscriptions are growing.
The reformed state treaty, which came into force in December 2025, entails comprehensive changes to public broadcasting following complaints from commercial operators. A key requirement is the reduction in the number of broadcast radio services and linear television channels provided by the two PSBs, ARD and ZDF, and greater cooperation between the two companies. One casualty of these changes is that the well-known 24-hour news channel Tagesschau24 will close at the end of 2026. The politics and documentary channel Phoenix, on the other hand, will continue but with a tighter remit focusing on live coverage of political and social events, with Tagesschau24 eventually integrated into it. Meanwhile, there will be far-reaching consequences for PSB online services, which will be required to have a stronger focus on audiovisual content and accept limits on text-based offerings while expanding cooperation with private media providers by integrating hyperlinks in their online services.
The commercial company RTL Germany is going through a major restructuring process around greater use of AI, digitisation, and is looking for more synergies across the company. Six hundred jobs will be lost, of which 230 are at RTL News, as the company focuses more on the streaming market. In spring 2026, RTL and ntv, which are both part of the RTL group, started broadcasting joint news on weekdays between 6 and 9 a.m. RTL Direkt, a news magazine programme on RTL, was discontinued last year.
The decline in the circulation of German daily newspapers has continued. Including Sunday editions, an average of 10.11m copies were sold per day in the fourth quarter of 2025, 5.7% down on the previous year. Meanwhile digital subscriptions increased overall by 8.5% to a total of 2.77m copies.1 However, the picture is mixed. While Bild saw its digital subscriptions increase to 253,000, other titles such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Süddeutsche Zeitung saw slight declines in their digital subscriptions to 139,000 and 105,000 respectively.2
Parallel to this development is a wave of increasing concentration, often with job cuts following mergers. At the end of 2025 the publishers of the daily city newspaper taz cited increased printing and distribution costs and changed reading habits as the reason for moving their weekday edition to online only (e-paper and app), while continuing to produce the weekend edition (wochentaz) both in print and digitally.
In contrast to these cutbacks a new newspaper for East Germany was launched in February 2026: the Ostdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. It is published in Dresden by the newly founded Ostdeutscher Verlag, and aims to fill a journalistic gap by reporting from the East for the East, whereas most East German regional papers are run from West Germany. The paper is digital-only in the week and in print at weekends. The owner, Holger Friedrich, is an East German who made his fortune in IT and together with his wife bought the Berliner Zeitung in 2019.
Across the media industry, cross-media strategies and the use of artificial intelligence are becoming increasingly common. One example is ARD and ZDF’s use of AI in their Olympics coverage, among other things, to create summaries and highlights of individual competitions. AI supported, for example, the technical analysis as well as the structuring of the extensive raw material. However, final control over the content remained with the editorial teams.
Other media companies are also experimenting with new AI-supported formats. For example, the non-profit investigative news title Correctiv also publishes its daily newsletter Correctiv Spotlight in audio on the main podcast platforms, using AI to generate the voice audio.
At the same time, several media companies are developing new digital and audiovisual offerings. After discontinuing its weekday print edition, taz, for example, is working on new digital formats and increasingly focusing on podcasts. Meanwhile, the new department of another Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel, called 'Voice and Vision', will combine and develop its audio, video, and social media content.
Sascha Hölig, Julia Behre, and Judith Möller
Leibniz Institute for Media Research, Hans Bredow Institute, Hamburg
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
The reach of news on TV and online has remained stable in recent years, while print news continues to decline, and news on social media shows a slight upward trend.
Pay for online news
11%
(-2)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
40%
(+3)
Trust in news overall
46%
(+1)
Global average: 37%
After reaching high levels during the pandemic and subsequently declining, overall trust in news in Germany has shown a slight upward trend since 2023 and currently stands at 46%. As in previous years, public service news and regional and local daily newspapers are the most trusted sources among those surveyed.
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
14/180
Score 82.17
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
Footnotes
1 Our DNR figures show a decline of 2pp to 11% in German respondents who paid for news online in the past year, but this survey question also includes payments to individuals and aggregators.