Switzerland
In a small country with four separate language regions, only the public broadcaster SRG SSR operates in all four media markets. SRG SSR remains under pressure after an intense referendum campaign, even though 62% voted against a proposal that would have halved its budget.
Initiated by right-wing politicians, the rejected proposal demanded a reduction of the licence fee for each household from 335 to 200 CHF (€368 to €220) p.a., as well as the abolition of the fee which larger companies are required to pay. During the campaign proponents claimed that SRG SSR’s reporting had a left-wing bias, was no longer relevant for young people, and crowded out private media in sports, entertainment, and the online news sector. Opponents, trying to refute these claims, argued for a strong Swiss public broadcaster in the face of a global environment dominated by big tech and powerful media billionaires and politicians. Overall, citizens seemed to be concerned that with a cut of 50%, SRG SSR would be unable to play its current role as a widely used and trusted media organisation.
Still, SRG SSR remains in a difficult position. Before the referendum, the federal government had already decided on a (less drastic) reduction of the licence fee for households and companies by 2029. For SRG SSR, this will mean a budget cut of up to 20% and a loss of roughly 1,000 jobs. There may also be pressure to restrict the breadth of SRG SSR’s activity when its licence is renewed by 2029, which may lead to further restrictions on text-based news reports online.
The relationship between public and private media remains multi-faceted. Most private media – Zurich-based TX Group being a notable exception – officially took a stance against the ‘SRG initiative’, largely due to a deal the Swiss publishers’ association had struck with SRG SSR in 2025. While not all details of this deal are public, it consists mainly of a range of restrictions for SRG SSR, such as limitations on bidding for sports rights, reducing content on platforms such as YouTube, and not increasing its range of newsletters.
Many private media are in a situation where the business of news is barely profitable, if at all. In a survey of national and local online news brands, most indicated they could just cover their costs (Udris et al. 2025). Startups beyond niches are very rare, and even though DNR 2026 data shows 19% of the Swiss consume news from news creators, very few (if any) Swiss news creators appear to reach sizeable audiences. Cost-cutting strategies and layoffs remain common. In late 2025 TX Group ended the publication of Switzerland’s most popular free newspaper, the print edition of 20 Minuten (including its French- and Italian-language equivalents), and further centralised news production at the now digital-only brand. This decision can be read both as a sign of journalism’s financial trouble and of a more decisive shift towards digital channels.
In its latest report, the NZZ group announced a 22% higher revenue per digital subscriber in Germany (8% in its home territory Switzerland), perhaps helped in part by its digital premium offer ‘NZZ Pro’, currently with over 20,000 subscribers. Ringier, publisher of Blick, says its growth comes mainly from digital marketplaces but sees potential in its new freemium paywall and in more use of AI in news production.
In March 2025, parliament approved an increase in the annual indirect press subsidy from CHF 50m to CHF 85m (€54m to €93m) for postage fees and early-morning delivery. Many publishers also hope that if a revised copyright law is passed it will require remuneration for use not only of snippets on search engines but also for content used by AI chatbots.
AI remains high on the agenda in the media industry. Most brands are still proceeding cautiously with GenAI, using it mainly for headline suggestions, editing, and rewriting of press releases. While companies have established AI guidelines, many journalists – according to survey data – do not know these guidelines, do not find them particularly helpful, or would prefer to see industry-wide standards (Fürst et al. 2025).
While Switzerland offers an overall protective climate for journalists, two events illustrated that press freedom can be challenged. First, in summer 2025, prosecutors searched the offices of a small online pure player, checking for breaches of the ‘bank secrecy law’ (a court later invalidated this search). This law makes it difficult for Swiss media to publish leaked information about Swiss banks. Second, Republik, a small online subscription-based pure player, exposed a lobbying campaign by Palantir in Switzerland, and may itself face legal action.
Linards Udris and Mark Eisenegger
Research Center for the Public Sphere & Society (fög), Department of Communication and Media Research (IKMZ), University of Zurich
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.
Pay for online news
19%
(-3)
French-speaking: 21%
German-speaking: 19%
Avoid the news sometimes/often
39%
(-)
French-speaking: 40%
German-speaking: 39%
Trust in news overall
42%
(-4)
French-speaking: 37%
German-speaking: 45%
Global average: 37%
Overall trust levels tend to fluctuate and are currently slightly lower than in 2025. However, many individual brands have seen trust increases in 2026. The PSB brands remain the most trusted in both German-speaking and French-speaking Switzerland, followed by subscription-based newspaper brands. Less trust is placed in tabloids, digital-born brands, and news from email providers and portals (Blue News, MSN, Yahoo!, gmx).
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
8/180
Score 84.83
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
