Singapore
Legacy brands continue to dominate Singapore’s news landscape in terms of audience use and trust, reflecting a small market long shaped by a de facto duopoly and tight state regulation. As audiences increasingly turn to digital platforms, social media, and AI‑mediated news consumption, media organisations are facing layoffs, restructuring, and ownership changes.
Channel News Asia (CNA) (47%) remains the most-used online news source in Singapore. CNA is part of the state-owned Mediacorp, which operates most television and radio stations in the country. Its portfolio includes the 24-hour news network CNA (used weekly by 31%), English-language Channel 5 (22%), and Mandarin-language Channel 8 (21%). In September 2025, Mediacorp announced that it was laying off 93 employees.
State-supported non-profit SPH Media Trust (SMT) publishes the country’s newspaper of record, the English-language The Straits Times, whose website (44%) is the third most-used online news source in our data, behind digital-native Mothership.sg (45%). In October 2025, SMT shuttered The New Paper, a tabloid founded in 1988, and merged it with its digital platform STOMP, which is known for user‑generated content and coverage of viral social media posts.
As part of its 180th anniversary in 2025, SMT revamped its website and mobile app, introducing features such as an AI-powered newsfeed and short article summaries. CNA has also started an investigative unit using AI, data analysis, and OSINT tools to report on disinformation.
Independent media players have also seen changes to ownership dynamics, with digital media outlet Rice Media being sold to a social media agency alongside staff layoffs earlier this year. Global advertising giant Publicis acquired Hepmil Media Group, the team behind SGAG, a digital content producer focused on young audiences, and other Southeast Asian meme and creator brands, as part of their social media push.
In November 2025, Singapore passed the new Online Safety Bill to better protect victims of online harms. While the bill aims to focus on addressing online harms such as inauthentic material or deepfake abuse and reputationally harmful statements, critics note the government’s growing power to direct platforms to take down harmful content.1
The government also continues to enforce the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA), which grants the government the authority to order the publication of corrections to online content that it considers erroneous. Refusal to comply may result in takedown orders, which can also be issued directly to technology platforms and internet service providers.
POFMA can also label news outlets as a Declared Online Location (DOL): such outlets have to carry warning notices for visitors and are prohibited from profiting from content deemed to spread falsehoods. Following the May 2025 elections, which saw the ruling party win 87 of 97 seats, the government issued multiple correction orders to individual users, platforms, and independent news outlets.2 This includes TOC, an independent local news site known for its political commentary. The government also blocked access in Singapore to a Malaysia news portal, MalaysiaNow, that did not comply with earlier correction orders.
Edson C. Tandoc Jr., Lydia Cheng, and Matthew Chew
Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
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 (87%) and social media (59%) remain the most common ways to access news. Television (40%) and print (17%) have consistently declined in the past several years. Some also access news via AI chatbots (11%) and podcasts (6%). Most participants do not pay for news, with 17% saying they are willing to do so.
Pay for online news
17%
(+1)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
26%
(-1)
Trust in news overall
46%
(+1)
Global average: 37%
Overall trust in news has been stable for the last three years. All major news brands recorded gains in brand trust, CNA (78%) and The Straits Times (77%) are the most trusted news brands in Singapore. The Online Citizen, which had been declared a DOL (Declared Online Location) since July 2023, also recorded a 3pp increase in its trust score (41%) from the previous year.
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
123/180
Score 44.57
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
