This study has been commissioned by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism to understand how news is being consumed in a range of countries. Research was conducted by YouGov using this online questionnaire from the middle of January to the end of February 2026.
Samples were assembled using nationally representative quotas for age, gender, and region in every market. Education quotas were applied in all markets except Kenya, Nigeria, Morocco, Peru, and Thailand. We also applied political quotas based on vote choice in the most recent national election in 13 markets, including the United States, Australia, and much of Western Europe. The data in all markets were weighted to targets based on census/industry accepted data.
Data from India, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa are representative of younger English-speakers and not the national population, because it is not possible to reach other groups in a representative way using an online survey. The survey was fielded mostly in English in these markets,1 and restricted to ages 18 to 50 in Kenya and Nigeria. Findings should not be taken to be nationally representative in these countries.
More generally, online samples will tend to under-represent the news consumption habits of people who are older and less affluent, meaning online use is typically over-represented and traditional offline use under-represented. In this sense, it is better to think of results as representative of the online population. In markets in Northern and Western Europe, where internet penetration is typically over 95%, the differences between the online population and national population will be small, but in South Africa (78%) and India (70%), where internet penetration is lower, the differences between the online population and the national population will be large, meaning we need to be cautious when comparing between markets.
The use of a non-probability sampling approach means that it is not possible to compute a conventional ‘margin of error’ for individual data points. However, differences of +/- 2 percentage points (pp) or less are very unlikely to be statistically significant and should be interpreted with a very high degree of caution. We typically do not regard differences of +/- 2pp as meaningful, and as a general rule we do not refer to them in the text. The same applies to small changes over time.
Surveys capture people’s self-reported behaviour, which does not always reflect people’s actual behaviour due to biases and imperfect recall. They are useful for capturing people’s opinions, but these are subjective and aggregates reflect public opinion rather than objective reality.2Even with relatively large sample sizes it is not possible to meaningfully analyse many minority groups. Some of our survey-based results will not match industry data, which are often based on different methodologies, such as web-tracking.
The report refers to a segmentation of news consumers into three groups which are determined by interest in news and frequency of consumption. ‘News lovers’ consume news at least twice a day and are extremely interested in news, or they consume news at least six times daily and are extremely or very interested in news. ‘Daily briefers’ consume news between twice a week and once a day and are extremely interested in the news, or they consume news between twice a week and five times daily and are very interested in news, or they consume news at least daily and are somewhat interested in news. ‘Casual/passive users’ are people whose interest in and/or frequency of consuming news does not meet the criteria for the other two segments.
Some verbatim quotes are included in this report, which are taken from a qualitative study of news definitions conducted as part of a separate research project (to be published later in 2026). This project set out to better understand what audiences consider to be ‘news’, to explore how people make these distinctions in practice, and to examine what people expect from news media across both legacy formats and newer digital spaces. Ten in-depth interviews were conducted in each of the UK, the United States, Argentina, and Norway in the final quarter of 2025.
Questions about use of individual social media and video networks (e.g. Facebook, X, Instagram) both for any purpose and for news content were repolled in all markets in the second half of March after an issue was discovered in the way these brands were presented to respondents in the original fieldwork.
In the United States we repolled some questions in the final week of March about online payment and also fielded a question about how Americans had been following news about the war in Iran. We use the online payment figures from the repoll in this report, but other reports may be based on the original data (which produced an online payment figure of 13% in the US).
A merger between two well-known radio stations (Caracol Radio and W Radio) took place in Colombia while fieldwork was underway. We decided to repoll questions about news brand reach and trust in Colombia to take account of this merger. All repolling was conducted with 1,000 respondents, using the same quotas as the original fieldwork.
A fuller description of the methodology, panel partners, and a discussion of non-probability sampling techniques can be found on our website along with the full questionnaire.
Authorship and research acknowledgements
Jim Egan is Senior Research Associate at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. He was Chief Executive Officer of BBC World News and bbc.com from 2012–2020 before becoming Chief Investment Officer of Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF). Prior to his position at RISJ he was part of the leadership team at FT Strategies, the media consulting arm of the Financial Times in London.
Dr Craig T. Robertson is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism whose interests include trends in news consumption, audience trust in and perceptions of news, and the impacts of technology on the news industry.
Dr Amy Ross Arguedas is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Digital News at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. She has worked extensively on issues around trust in media and previously worked as a journalist for the Costa Rican newspaper La Nación.
Nic Newman is Senior Research Associate at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and is also a consultant on digital media, working actively with news companies on product, audience, and business strategies for digital transition. He was the lead author of the first 14 editions of the Digital News Report and continues to write an annual report for the Institute on future media and technology trends.
Prof. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen is Professor at the Department of Communication of the University of Copenhagen and a former Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. His work focuses on changes in the news media, political communication, and the role of digital technologies in both.
Mitali Mukherjee is Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. She is a political economy journalist with more than two decades of experience in TV, print, and digital journalism. Mitali was Consulting Business Editor at The Wire and Mint in India. Prior to that she was Markets Editor at CNBC TV 18 and Prime Time Anchor at TV Today and Doordarshan.
Dr Richard Fletcher is Deputy Director at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and Director of Research. He is primarily interested in global trends in digital news consumption, the use of social media by journalists and news organisations, and more broadly, the relationship between computer-based technologies and journalism.
Market-level commentary and additional insight around media developments have been provided by academic partners and by our network of Reuters Journalist Fellows around the world. RISJ Senior Research Associate Dr David Levy again did invaluable work editing and further developing many of the country profiles in this year’s report. Additional expert analysis and interpretation of the survey data were provided by the team at YouGov, in particular, Charlotte Clifford, David Eastbury, Caryhs Innes, Mimi Smith-Jones, and Ben Seddon.
Project management
The copyediting and design process of the Digital News Report 2026 was overviewed by the Reuters Institute's publications officer Alex Reid. This HTML version was edited by Eduardo Suárez, Matthew Leake, Gretel Kahn and Marina Adami, and the charts were created by data journalists from the company Storydata.
The video podcast was recorded and edited by Ben Johnston. Matthew Leake wrote the scripts for the Digital News Report podcast series. The recorded and edited the series, as well as the short vertical videos on the report.
The report was translated into Spanish by the Argentinian journalist Abel Escudero Zadrayec, founder and editor-in-chief of 8000, a news outlet at Bahía Blanca. The translation was edited by the Reuters Institute's editorial team.
Footnotes
1 Respondents in India could choose to complete the survey in Hindi and respondents in Kenya could chose Swahili, but in both cases the vast majority selected an English survey.
2 From 2012 to 2020 we filtered out respondents who said that they had not consumed any news in the past month. From 2021 onwards we included this group, which generally has lower interest in news. In previous years this group averaged around 2–3% of the starting sample in each market, meaning that the decision to include it has not affected comparative results in any significant way. Some figures have been affected by one or two points in the UK, the USA, and Australia, and we have taken this into account when interpreting changes involving these years.