United Kingdom
News consumption in the UK continues to be dominated by traditional print and broadcast brands, and although direct traffic remains comparatively strong, almost all news organisations worry about threats to direct audience access. Review of the BBC’s Charter and potential consolidation among commercial players point to significant change in 2026.
Despite its large majority in the UK parliament the Labour government led by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer appeared to many commentators to lose its way over the past year, and his opinion poll ratings collapsed. Amid growing tensions on the right of British politics the insurgent populist party, Reform, made much of the political weather in the UK. It had a profound impact on the most prominent issue dominating domestic politics, the immigration debate.
News organisations, especially public service ones, wrestled with the challenges of reporting on the immigration story and have also battled to accommodate stark differences of opinion within the British public on big international stories, not least the conflict in the Middle East.
Within the news industry, the biggest story was the latest crisis at the BBC. This centred around a BBC Panorama documentary from October 2024 which featured an edit of President Trump's speech on 6 January 2021 that created what the BBC acknowledged to be a misleading impression. BBC News executives became aware of this in February 2025 but took no action, largely because the BBC had received no complaints. However, an internal BBC memo written by an external editorial standards adviser was leaked to the Daily Telegraph in late November and quickly became a major scandal. As the BBC Board wrestled with how to respond, the White House became involved and, by the end of the week, both the CEO of BBC News, Deborah Turness, and the BBC's Director General, Tim Davie, had resigned. President Trump subsequently issued a defamation lawsuit for damages of $10bn, which the BBC is contesting. Meanwhile, the BBC's ten-year Charter is being reviewed by the government. This major strategic exercise is due to conclude by December 2026 and is now led on the BBC side by new Director General, Matt Brittin, formerly President of the EMEA region at Google until early 2025.
The other biggest policy and regulatory issue is the ongoing question of social media and its role in the UK. Concerns about social media are among the highest anywhere, with 73% of Britons saying they distrust news on social media and 77% expressing concerns about fake news and misinformation. A government consultation about the potential banning of social media for under-16s was launched in March 2026.
The BBC is now using artificial intelligence (AI) in ways directly visible to audiences. Domestically it has piloted AI-assisted news summaries such as short ‘at a glance’ formats, designed to help users quickly understand complex stories while retaining human editorial oversight. Internationally, the BBC World Service has introduced digital, AI-assisted language services, including BBC News Polska, combining original journalism by Polish-speaking journalists with AI-assisted translation of other articles.
The Guardian has continued to invest heavily in its digital products, with a redesigned app and homepage that place greater emphasis on personalisation, audio, and interactive formats as the organisation continues to pursue its membership-led business model.
Sky News is midway through a significant strategic reset that places greater emphasis on digital, video-first products alongside its traditional broadcast offer. Sky News increasingly focuses on online, where it is one of only three brands reaching more than 10% of the news audience weekly. Plans to introduce a subscription offer have been announced for later in 2026.
The Daily Mail embraced the creator economy in pursuit of younger, digitally native audiences, including two dedicated social initiatives staffed with Gen Z talent producing original, personality-led video content. 18% of UK respondents say they consume content from a news-focused creator/influencer each week.
At the corporate level, the Daily Mail was quick to table a £500m bid for the Daily Telegraph following the collapse of the Daily Telegraph's acquisition by RedBird IMI in November 2025. However, a rival £575m bid by Axel Springer in early March 2026 was accepted and given fast-tracked regulatory approval. A major broadcast merger is proposed between Comcast-owned Sky and the broadcast interests of ITV, Britain’s leading commercial broadcaster. Given increasing pressure from international competition, deeper collaboration between the UK’s public service media organisations is also being discussed. Taken together, the processes underway in 2026 affecting the UK's largest public service and commercial broadcast and print providers could amount to the biggest reshaping of the news landscape in the UK for a generation.
Jim Egan
Senior Research Associate, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism
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
A further 12-point fall in TV since 2021 appears the biggest change but the overall picture conceals a growing preference among younger adults for news from social media and video networks.
Pay for online news
10%
(-)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
50%
(+4)
Trust in news overall
30%
(-5)
Global average: 37%
After some years of stability, trust in news is down 5pp compared to 2025. Trust in individual news brands is little changed, however, suggesting other factors may be behind the year-on-year drop in trust overall. Once again public broadcasters such as the BBC, ITV News, and Channel 4 remain the most trusted brands along with the Financial Times.
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
18/180
Score 79.45
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
