Italy
Historically characterised by television dominance, concentrated ownership, and a relatively slow digital transition, Italy’s media landscape is now being reshaped by disputes over platform power, major ownership changes, and the rise of new online actors. The result is a more competitive but also more fragmented market, where legacy brands, digital-born outlets, and creators increasingly coexist and compete.
Italy’s legacy media sector is still dominated by TV, which generates 73% of traditional media revenues. The sector has historically been highly concentrated around the PSB Rai and the Berlusconi family’s Mediaset. Rai remains the leading operator, ahead of Sky and Mediaset, and these three broadcasters together account for 69% of total TV revenues. Meanwhile, streaming platforms such as Netflix, DAZN, Amazon, and Disney continue to expand, now capturing more than 21% of TV revenues.
Growth in digital advertising has not benefited the wider media sector evenly, as revenue has become ever more concentrated among a few large platforms. The latest figures, for 2024, show that platforms took over 85% of gross digital advertising revenues, further marginalising publishers and traditional advertising sales houses.1
Weekly offline reach figures are dominated by the news and current affairs programmes of Italy’s leading broadcasters. Among print outlets, only Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica are used weekly by 10% of respondents. These are the flagship titles of Italy’s two main publishing groups, Cairo/RCS and GEDI. Cairo/RCS also owns the commercial broadcaster La7, while GEDI has historically owned several newspapers, radio stations, and digital-native brands.
GEDI has undergone rapid and far-reaching change in recent years and, most recently, in March 2026, it was 100% acquired by the Greek media group Antenna, controlled by the Kyriakou family. The transaction includes La Repubblica, Radio Deejay, Radio Capital, HuffPost Italia, National Geographic Italia, Limes, and the advertising sales house Manzoni, but not the daily La Stampa, already sold separately to regional publisher SAE. The deal is the latest step in a broader reshaping of GEDI, after earlier disposals of many local titles and of the weekly L’Espresso in 2022.
Online news use is less dominated by broadcasters than the offline market. Although Mediaset, Sky, and Rai are important digital brands, they face much stronger competition online from newspaper websites such as La Repubblica, Corriere della Sera, Il Fatto Quotidiano, and Il Sole 24 Ore, alongside the news agency ANSA. The online environment has also created more room for digital-born players. Fanpage continues to lead the online rankings, while Il Post, HuffPost Italia, and CityNews (owner of local outlets such as RomaToday and MilanoToday) have also built meaningful audiences. This shift is even more visible among younger users, where the social-first brand Will Media and the digital native Il Post reach 11% and 15% of under-35s respectively.
Italy became an important testing ground for how publishers, regulators, and policymakers are seeking to redefine the relationship between journalism and tech platforms. In 2025 the media and telecoms regulator AGCOM issued high-profile decisions determining the ‘fair remuneration’ due from Meta and LinkedIn for the use of GEDI’s journalistic publications. AGCOM did not publish the figures but €9–10m for Meta appeared in some press reports.2 In October 2025, the newspaper publishers’ federation FIEG filed a complaint with AGCOM against Google’s AI Overviews, arguing that AI-generated summaries were reducing traffic to news websites and weakening advertising revenues.3 Both issues will have European repercussions. Meta challenged key parts of AGCOM’s fair remuneration decision, with the Italian court referring the case to the Court of Justice of the EU.4 In February 2026 the AGCOM President said he was preparing to report Google AI Mode to the European Commission because of its impact on the press and on freedom of information. These disputes unfolded alongside Italy’s new AI law, approved in late 2025, which introduced a national framework covering AI harms, copyright, data, and training uses.
Influencers and content creators are becoming more relevant in Italy, and regulators have started to respond. In July 2025, AGCOM adopted a new code of conduct for ‘significant’ influencers, later opening a registration portal for larger creators and introducing basic rules on transparency, commercial disclosure, and content responsibility. In the final days of the March 2026 constitutional referendum campaign, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni appeared on Pulp Podcast, a video podcast hosted by a popular Italian rapper and YouTuber. At the same time, Substack has gained ground among established journalists and commentators, including Stefano Feltri and Selvaggia Lucarelli, whose newsletters quickly attracted large paying audiences.
Alessio Cornia
Dublin City University, Ireland
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
Weekly reach for TV news is down slightly but remains comparatively high, while print is at just 11%. After an 11pp fall since 2020, social media use for news is up 6pp.
Pay for online news
8%
(-1)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
36%
(+3)
Trust in news overall
32%
(-4)
Global average: 37%
Trust in news has fallen further and remains comparatively low, at 32%. In Italy’s highly polarised media environment, brands seen as more neutral tend to attract higher levels of trust, while outlets with a clearer partisan profile generally score lower and are trusted mainly by those who share similar political views.
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
56/180
Score 65.16
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
Footnotes
1 https://www.agcom.it/pubblicazioni/relazioni-annuali
2 https://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/agcom-meta-dovra-versare-nove-milioni-euro-gedi-AHqxj3fB
3 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/16/google-ai-overviews-italian-news-publishers-demand-investigation
4 https://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/meta-giornali-l-avvocato-ue-da-ragione-editori-AHhBZceB