Poland
The growing influence of ideological, creator-led media ventures became one of the defining features of Poland’s media market this year. As audiences shifted towards smaller right-wing outlets, the traditional hierarchy of broadcasters and news organisations continued to fragment.
The June 2025 presidential election campaign was the most widely followed political event of the year. It was unusually intense, featuring five televised debates between candidates, and saw a narrow victory for the conservative Karol Nawrocki, which was a blow to the government of centre-right Prime Minister Donald Tusk. The campaign boosted media consumption but also deepened polarisation, reinforcing the position of politically aligned outlets while public service broadcaster TVP remained weakened by political and legal conflict.
Television audiences remained fragmented, with TVN continuing to lead among news providers, while other channels competed for more politically defined audiences. TV Republika, the conservative news broadcaster once considered marginal, entered the group of the four largest television channels in Poland in 2025 for the first time.
Nearly two years after the controversial changes to its board, TVP’s audience figures are relatively unchanged, with weekly reach for all TVP’s offline news in the Digital News Report at 25%. Amidst disputes over governance and financing, the PSB expects to close 2025 with a net loss between €443 and €454m (compared to €5m in 2024), which will increase its dependence on government subsidies, with inevitable political consequences.
According to Reporters Without Borders, political pressure on public service media in Poland is not only intense but, in some cases, extreme.1 The resulting legal and political uncertainty has further weakened the position of the public broadcaster in an already competitive market.
Alongside the rise of ideological television outlets, digital challengers continued to expand, aided by the interest in the presidential election. The most visible example remains Kanał Zero, the online news and commentary project. After rapidly building an audience on YouTube, the platform broadened its ambitions in 2025. The National Broadcasting Council granted Kanał Zero a satellite television licence in October, and the channel officially launched on 20 May 2026. It also started the news website Zero.pl in March 2026. The launch of a programme hosted by former president Andrzej Duda further increased its visibility, highlighting growing links between political figures and emerging creator-led media.
This shift towards personality-driven journalism was reflected across the wider ecosystem of politically aligned digital media. Internal tensions within the conservative media group Fratria – publisher of the portal wPolityce.pl and the television channel wPolsce24 – led several prominent commentators to leave the organisation and launch a new online initiative, Kanał TAK! on YouTube.
While new entrants reshaped parts of the media landscape, mergers continued between established players. In December 2025 the media and events group PTWP acquired a majority stake (56.82%) in Gremi Media, publisher of the daily Rzeczpospolita, in a share-swap transaction valuing the stake at about €10.7m, one of the biggest recent deals in the press market. PTWP’s acquisition reflected a broader trend where publishers increasingly combine journalism with conferences and specialised information services.
Poland’s media system also remained closely tied to global developments in the entertainment industry. Throughout 2025 the future ownership of the commercial broadcaster TVN – the most widely used source of news in Poland – remained uncertain, as its parent company Warner Bros. Discovery repeatedly explored its sale before suspending the process. The situation shifted again after Paramount Skydance announced its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, placing TVN within another global restructuring whose implications for the Polish market remain unclear.
Technological changes introduced by global platforms created further pressure for publishers. Google introduced AI Overviews and AI Mode in Poland in 2025, reducing referral traffic and putting additional strain on publishers’ digital business models. Data from the SEO analytics firm Senuto, covering the period up to June 2025, based on Google Search Console data from more than 1,400 Polish websites, suggests that the introduction of AI Overviews was associated with a decline in click-through rates of around 19% year-on-year, indicating reduced referral traffic from search.2
Several media groups introduced layoffs and editorial consolidation to reduce costs. Agora, publisher of Gazeta Wyborcza and the portal Gazeta.pl, announced job cuts affecting more than 100 employees, while other companies rationalised their editorial teams. In May 2026 Ringier Axel Springer Polska, owner of Onet, also announced layoffs affecting around 120 employees.
Relations between publishers and technology platforms also became increasingly confrontational. An analysis commissioned by the Digital Publishers Employers Association (ZPWC) estimated that Google should pay Polish media organisations roughly €120m p.a. for the use of journalistic content.3 Publishers subsequently submitted a request for mediation to the Office of Electronic Communications, highlighting growing tensions over the distribution of value between platforms and news organisations.
Vadim Makarenko
Insights and Research Products Director, Ringier Axel Springer Polska; former Reuters Institute Journalist Fellow
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
Online news use remains stable, while traditional sources continue their gradual decline. New formats such as AI chatbots are beginning to emerge but overall consumption patterns have not shifted significantly in the last year.
Pay for online news
11%
(-2)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
46%
(+3)
Trust in news overall
39%
(-8)
Global average: 37%
Overall trust in news in Poland fell sharply to 39% in 2026, one of the largest year-on-year declines across markets, despite stable ratings for individual brands. This gap reflects heightened political polarisation during the presidential election, rising news avoidance, and exposure to misinformation, suggesting dissatisfaction with the media environment rather than with the outlets people use.
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
27/180
Score 75.52
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
