Nigeria
Survey sample primarily composed of English speakers
Nigeria’s media market is one of the largest and most vibrant in Africa, shaped by a highly digital audience and a fast-growing social media ecosystem. Over the past year, economic pressures, debates around press freedom, platform dominance, and growing experimentation with artificial intelligence (AI) have shaped the environment in which journalism operates.
Nigeria has a large and fragmented media market. Radio accounts for the highest number of outlets, followed by television, while newspapers are fewer but remain influential. The landscape reflects a hybrid environment where legacy media coexist with digital-born brands. International broadcasters such as BBC News maintain a strong reach with our English-speaking sample, alongside domestic television like Channels Television and established print titles including The Punch and Vanguard Newspaper. At the same time, digital-born brands such as Pulse Nigeria and Legit.ng continue to grow, particularly among younger audiences, reflecting broader shifts towards mobile and social news consumption.
Press freedom remains a key concern. The recent rankings by Reporters Without Borders indicate an improvement in Nigeria’s global position from 122 to 112, but concerns remain about harassment of journalists and the use of cybercrime legislation in cases involving reporters. Several journalists1 were detained under cybercrime-related allegations despite ongoing reforms2 , including the 2024 amendment to the Cybercrimes Act (Section 24). In one widely reported case, journalist Matthew Ojodumawas released after more than nine months in detention before being cleared of charges. State-level actions have also raised alarm, including the closure of Badeggi Radio by the Niger State governor3, which drew condemnation from editors. The Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) have challenged the use of the Cybercrimes Act before the ECOWAS Court of Justice4, while the federal government has signalled its willingness to review the law in collaboration with the media and the National Assembly.
At the same time, economic pressures continue to shape the operating environment for media organisations. The Nigerian Guild of Editors has publicly warned of a potential media collapse, citing unsustainable costs, declining advertising revenue, and regulatory headwinds. In response, industry bodies have called for policy support, fiscal relief, and tariff relief on newsprint and broadcasting materials.5 President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has tacitly endorsed measures to support the sector.
Alongside these challenges, Nigerian publishers are concerned about the influence of global technology platforms. The Newspaper Proprietors’ Association of Nigeria has argued that Big Tech companies are disrupting traditional business models. Publishers say they are losing advertising revenue and web traffic to digital platforms, while news content is used to train AI models without compensation. These concerns have prompted calls for clearer regulatory frameworks governing the relationship between platforms and publishers.
Despite these challenges, Nigeria continues to see growth in digital-first publishing. A new online outlet, Pinnacle Daily, launched in October 2025, has added to the growing number of digital-native news platforms in the country. Similarly, Agujiegbe Media was formally unveiled in September 2025 in Lagos as a verified online news and creative media platform with ambitions to expand into TV and radio, supported by a network of over 1,000 members.
Another notable shift in the Nigerian information ecosystem is the growing influence of news creators and social media influencers. In a market where social and video networks like Facebook (81%) and YouTube (78%) are widely used, influencers often act as curators and amplifiers of stories, contributing to how public debates evolve online. This trend has also inspired infrastructure-style launches: LekeeLekee, a Nigerian social platform developed by the founders of Arise and THISDAY, explicitly positions itself as an African alternative, offering direct monetisation for creators and promoting ‘digital sovereignty’, a model particularly relevant for news and commentary creators.
Traditional news organisations, however, have generally maintained an adversarial approach, seeing creators as competitors occupying roles historically associated with professional journalists, such as agenda-setting and gatekeeping. Younger journalists appear more open to engaging with influencer-driven distribution models, although this often occurs outside traditional newsroom structures as freelance or independent creators, contributing to a more fragmented but also more diverse media ecosystem.
Artificial intelligence has become a growing area of experimentation within Nigeria’s journalism. The Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development recently inducted 33 organisations into its Nigeria AI Collective CSO/Media Advocacy Group to support responsible AI governance. The International Centre for Investigative Reporting has launched NativeAI, a tool designed to provide automated transcription and translation that recognises local accents and languages, while JournoTECH has introduced NewsAssist AI to support newsroom workflows.
Across the industry, AI-generated content and visuals are increasingly appearing in news production, but a formal guidelines framework is still emerging. Organisations such as the Nigeria Union of Journalists have yet to establish comprehensive policies, and many journalists continue to rely on free tools. Concerns are also growing about the spread of AI-generated propaganda in local languages.
Tolulope Owajoba Adeyemo
Code for Africa
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 English-speaking, online news users in Nigeria – a subset of a larger, more diverse, media market. Respondents are generally more affluent, younger (18–50 only), have higher levels of formal education, and are more likely to live in cities than the wider Nigerian population. Findings should not be taken to be nationally representative.
Share news via social, messaging or email
63%
(+4)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
32%
(-3)
Trust in news overall
68%
(-)
Global average: 37%
Trust in news in Nigeria remains relatively high at 68%, placing it joint first among the 48 markets surveyed. The media operate within a context shaped by political pressure and commercial constraints, factors that may influence perceptions of independence even as some brands, such as Arise TV News, retain audience confidence, recording a (+3pp) gain in trust.
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
112/180
Score 48.11
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
Footnotes
1 https://cpj.org/2025/11/3-nigerian-journalists-detained-on-cybercrime-allegations-despite-reform/
2 https://cpj.org/2025/12/nigerian-travel-journalist-jailed-on-terror-charge-in-benin-since-january/
3 https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/headlines/811566-outrage-as-governor-shuts-down-independent-radio-station.html
4 https://serap-nigeria.org/2025/01/12/serap-takes-tinubu-govt-governors-to-ecowas-court-over-misuse-of-cybercrimes-act/
5 https://statehouse.gov.ng/president-tinubu-promises-to-look-into-tariffs-for-media-business-calls-for-greater-collaboration-for-national-development/