Portugal
The Portuguese media landscape is undergoing significant structural change, evident in the restructuring of a major private media group, proposals to reform the PSB RTP and mounting challenges facing journalists. The market is dominated by four main commercial media groups – Impresa, Medialivre (formerly Cofina), Media Capital, and Global Media – alongside RTP, creating a difficult environment for new entrants.
As Portuguese commercial media companies seek to adapt to a more competitive digital environment, many see increased media concentration and recourse to foreign investors as key to that adaptation. One recent example of this trend came in March 2026 when the Italian MediaForEurope (MFE) media group bought about one-third of the Impresa group (which owns SIC and Expresso) in an investment focused on commercial and digital synergies. This entry consolidates MFE's presence in six European markets and reinforces the sense of the Iberian Peninsula as an integrated market for advertisers, putting pressure on domestic competitors such as Media Capital and Medialivre to accelerate their own digital and revenue diversification strategies.
One factor that attracts both domestic and foreign investors is the strength of the TV sector. In 2024 Medialivre launched its own 24-hour news channel to challenge the three existing ones. While competition is fierce, the TV sector remains strong in terms of innovation and investment, fostered by historically high audiences, keen for both entertainment and news – seven out of ten people in Portugal accessed news on TV in the previous week, the highest rate across all 48 markets surveyed.
The collapse of magazine publisher Trust in News marked a significant development in Portugal’s media sector in 2025, resulting in the closure of historical titles like Visão, Exame, and Jornal de Letras. As the country’s largest magazine publisher, with an estimated readership of 1.7m, its disappearance marked a major contraction in the print magazine market. The case intensified debate over the sustainability of magazine journalism in Portugal and exposed structural economic challenges within the legacy media sector. Visão nevertheless continues in print and online, sustained by a group of journalists through crowdfunding initiatives. The troubles faced by Visão are emblematic of the print sector’s business struggles, an issue that is even more prevalent in the regional and local news scene.
The government is implementing its new media policy for 2025–9. This is underpinned by Media Action and National Media Literacy plans looking to promote media literacy, combat disinformation, and encourage the responsible consumption of news and media content. The action plan also covers a wide-ranging review of the key media laws and seeks to tackle the rise of news deserts. Importantly, the new policy framework also aims to safeguard the distribution of printed newspapers to remote and sparsely populated areas, with a €3.5m press distribution scheme. Over three years, the funding will support both general distribution and newsagents in these areas.
Last year also saw renewed tensions between journalists' trade unions and the government on proposed changes at LUSA, the Portuguese national news agency. The debate gained prominence after the government retook full ownership of the agency. The priorities include a modernisation plan, and the strengthening of synergies between LUSA and the public service broadcaster RTP. The RTP board's decision to unify its various brands under a single visual identity has sparked a major internal dispute, with journalists warning that such a move could undermine the independence and distinct character of public service news.
The ongoing changes within RTP highlight a broader dilemma between the rationalisation of resources and the preservation of institutional autonomy and diversity in public service in Europe. For journalists and newsrooms, the challenge lies in responding to the demands of technological innovation and fighting misinformation without exacerbating precariousness and abandoning the professional standards that sustain trust in the public service media provider.
Several media organisations are innovating with new formats. Outlets such as Expresso are investing in vertical video content, and news channels such as the Conta Lá are experimenting with AI-based news anchors to cover election results. AI keeps making its way into newsrooms, but adoption remains uneven and largely unstructured. The recently published White Book on AI Applied to Journalism in Portugal finds that most journalists lack training and that newsrooms have been slow to establish internal policies for the use of AI tools. It also highlights that insufficient governance and skills could undermine editorial standards and trust.1
Ana Pinto-Martinho, Miguel Paisana, and Gustavo Cardoso
Observatorio da Comunicacao and ISCTE, University Institute of Lisbon
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
With solid reliance on both television and social media for news, concerns focus on the radio and print sectors where diminishing audiences and ad revenue are not offset by a rise in payment for digital news.
Pay for online news
8%
(-2)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
37%
(+2)
Trust in news overall
51%
(-3)
Global average: 37%
Overall trust in news is at the highest level in Europe outside the Nordic countries. Nevertheless, some worry that the slow but steady decline of trust in the news may be linked to growing political polarisation. By contrast, trust in most brands has increased, with RTP among the most trusted.
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
10/180
Score 83.71
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
