India
Survey sample primarily composed of English speakers
India’s news cycle was dominated by state elections, bilateral relations, and a contentious constitutional amendment. These developments were accompanied by regional language news and hyperlocal content from diverse media players, including mainstream news organisations and independent journalists. As video-led social media platforms continue to attract both traditional players and new content creators, media like TV now offer multiple avenues for news.
With a majority of respondents saying they find news online and over half of those saying they use social media platforms for news, legacy sources like TV (44%) have retained popularity for news by offering multiple avenues such as traditional subscription models or connected TV, blurring the lines between traditional broadcast and digital content formats.
Video-based social media platforms support diverse actors – news organisations, independent journalists, and news creators – making them a popular source of news. In India, around 58% of respondents rely on YouTube for news.
The Collective Newsroom in India is developing a playbook on how to build partnerships with content creators, including selection and training frameworks. The project will run as a pilot in Hindi and Marathi. Saurabh Dwivedi, former founding editor of The Lallantop, joined The Indian Express Group in January 2026. Dwivedi is expected to drive the group’s Hindi digital content and social media reach. Individual news creators continue to garner large audiences in India. Raj Shamani, for example, is a young creator and entrepreneur with close to 17m subscribers on YouTube and his long-form podcast Figuring Out focuses on finance, news, and personal growth. In a move to tap into their popularity and reach, the Indian government announced collaborations with content creators for its broadcast arms – DD News and Akashvani (AIR). It also plans to train 15,000 creators and media professionals on AI through partnerships with Google and YouTube.1
News channels in regional languages, like Odisha TV and Aaj Tak, have been experimenting with AI anchors and AI clones of popular news anchors. Digital-born news outlet Scroll.in developed a tool that extracts and converts media from a text article into a short video for social channels. The Hindu, a legacy print brand, experimented with an AI character during the recent Assembly elections for poll-related video news. AI integration is, however, uneven across newsrooms due to a lack of resources, knowledge, or genuine concerns around the dilution of editorial safeguards and trust in news.
Early this year, the Indian government introduced a slew of amendments to the IT Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code. The amendments look at identifying and labelling synthetically generated information (SGI), and streamlining procedures to take down content by social media platforms when flagged by relevant authorities under the law.2 Further, the amendments include provisions to oversee content put up by creators, who are not publishers but comment on news and current affairs on social media platforms.3
However, these amendments have been met with concerns they may dilute procedural safeguards around the removal of content and in the protection of free speech. Some of these include a reduced time limit for platforms to remove content, exercising restraint before publishing content that may violate the law, overlooking benign or creative purposes of AI by way of a broad definition for SGI, and overreach of executive powers to take down content. Intermediaries and platforms risk losing their safe-harbour provisions if they fail to comply with the takedown orders.4
In another worrying instance of attacks on press freedom, the office of one of India’s oldest news agencies, United News of India (UNI), was sealed by the local police in Delhi in March, following an order from the Delhi High Court cancelling its land allotment. The move witnessed force to seal the premises on the day the order was passed. Several journalist bodies, including the Press Council of India and the Editors Guild of India, criticised the move as ‘high handed’ and a display of ‘excessive force’.5
In the latest RSF Press Freedom Index, India ranks 157 out of 180 countries – a drop of six places since last year. While India has ranked lower in RSF’s rankings in the past, its current position indicates the legal, political, and economic challenges the press continues to face in one of the most diverse media markets in the world.
Anjana Krishnan
Research Associate, Asian College of Journalism, Chennai
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.
Methodology note
These data are based on a survey of mainly English-speaking, online news users in India – a small subset of a larger, more diverse, media market. Findings in this online poll are not nationally representative and will tend to under-represent the continued importance of traditional media such as TV and print.
Share news via social, messaging or email
47%
(+3)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
52%
(+2)
Trust in news overall
39%
(-4)
Global average: 37%
India witnessed a 4pp decrease in trust levels. Overall trust in news for India is 39%, placing it eighteenth among 48 markets in the survey. At the brand level, trust in legacy print publishers and public broadcasters remains high.
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
157/180
Score 31.96
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
Footnotes
1 https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/india-to-train-15000-creators-in-ai-through-govtgoogleyoutube-partnership/articleshow/129758389.cms
2 https://www.dw.com/en/india-tightens-ai-rules-for-social-media-platforms/a-75903631
3 https://www.deccanherald.com/india/explained-centres-draft-it-rules-how-are-they-going-to-affect-social-media-creators-3950725
4 https://internetfreedom.in/it-intermediary-amendment-rules-2026-contradict-their-purpose/.
5 https://www.deccanherald.com/india/journalists-bodies-condemn-manhandling-use-of-excessive-force-in-sealing-uni-premises-3939919#google_vignette