Ireland
A shift towards reader revenue, digital products, and direct state support for public-interest reporting shaped Irish journalism in the last year. But the year also exposed the vulnerability of the wider information environment, as trust fell and AI-related anxieties grew.
Ireland remains a relatively strong market for paid news by international standards, with DNR 2026 data showing 22% paying for news online, but print and TV have continued to decline over the last five years. At the same time, news avoidance stands at 47%, a significant increase from 41% in 2025 and among the highest increases over the past year globally. Meanwhile 7% of Irish participants use AI chatbots for news, substantially more than in the UK (4%).
Overall trust in news fell sharply to 42%, down 9pp year-on-year, and among the biggest drops globally. This drop follows a slight rebound in 2025 (51%) but is still substantially below the 46% found in 2024. However, trust in Irish journalistic media brands remains stable in the 2026 report. Trust being down may be a result of reduced trust in the information system generally, given that individual brand trust overall is holding up.
At the national public service broadcaster RTÉ, 2025 was the year in which it looked to operationalise change following years of scandal. Ireland’s public service media provider is dual-funded, with revenue from commercial activities and TV licence/public funding. In 2025 an agreement on RTÉ’s funding was reached with the government. Its public funding is rising from €225m in 2025 to €240m in 2026 and to €260m in 2027. Even so, the broadcaster moved into the first year of its 2025–9 ‘New Direction’ strategy very much in restructuring mode, with plans for a stronger focus on digital, streaming, and on-demand services, substantially more commissioning from the independent sector, and internal transformation, with a focus on reducing staff and moving more programming outside of Dublin. However, two unions representing RTÉ employees, including the National Union of Journalists, have opposed the new strategy and are campaigning for change. Some academics have also expressed concern about a dilution of the public service remit. Regarding news output specifically, RTÉ introduced new offerings with the Behind the Story podcast and its digital and social media focused fact-checking service, Clarity, which seeks to tackle disinformation.
The Irish Times in 2025 was the flagship Irish example of reader revenue driving newsroom redesign. Editor Ruadhán MacCormaic describes a shift from being ‘digital first’ to being ‘audience’ or ‘subscriber first’, with four digital commissioning desks, a separate print production unit, and more investment in newsletters, video, podcasts, and investigations. Subscriber revenue now fully funds its journalism, with around 150,000 print and digital subscribers across The Irish Times Group.
Mediahuis Ireland appointed a new CEO to manage its national and regional news brands. Focus remains on investment in local journalism in individual counties, and it continues to convert readers into paying subscribers, who now number over 100,000, to its Belfast Telegraph and Irish Independent titles as it moves toward its target of 200,000. The company has also invested heavily in podcasting and now boasts four in-house studios and a wide range of shows.
The Business Post, meanwhile, has completed a digital-first transformation, with a new CEO starting in June. Its North Star project oversaw a re-engineering of the Sunday print title into a premium digital-first publisher built around newsletters, data, audience metrics, seven-day workflows, and a clearer business-information proposition.
Overall, there's a vibrant podcasting culture and 23% of Irish respondents say they now consume some content from creators who focus on news. Established brands largely host the most popular news-focused podcasts.
Policy and regulation also moved higher up the agenda. In 2025, the government approved the General Scheme of the Media Regulation Bill and the General Scheme of the Broadcasting (Amendment) Bill. These will implement the European Media Freedom Act, introducing, for example, rules for media-mergers, transparency in state advertising spend, and the independence of public service media. At the same time, publishers intensified warnings about the economic effects of generative AI and pressed for faster legal reform, especially on copyright and defamation. And the media regulator, Coimisiún na Meán, renewed its direct state support for journalism, announcing in January 2026 more than €15m in funding for several schemes, including Local Democracy and Courts Reporting, News and Current Affairs Commercial Television, News Reporting, and Digital Transformation.
Jane Suiter
Professor, Dublin City University
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
TV and print continued their long decline as news sources while online remained broadly steady. Social media was flat, and podcasts remained a niche news source.
Pay for online news
22%
(+2)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
47%
(+6)
Trust in news overall
42%
(-9)
Global average: 37%
Overall trust in news fell precipitously and is down some 9pp to just 42%. Yet trust in major brands online and offline, such as RTÉ, the Irish Times, Irish Independent, and The Journal remain unchanged. In contrast, trust in BBC News has dropped 3pp.
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
7/180
Score 85.93
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
