“Impartiality and personality are not opposites” – Our Digital News Report US launch panel on tackling the coming changes

With trust in news at a record low, what are news publishers in the United States doing to compete with alternative voices and engage audiences on their own terms? This was the question at the heart of the US launch of the Digital News Report, who took place at Reuters New York headquarters on Thursday 18 June. 

Introduced by Reuters managing director Alphonse Hardel, the event featured a presentation by the report’s lead author Jim Egan, followed by a discussion moderated by the Institute's director, Mitali Mukherjee. The panel featured Mukul Devichand, editor of AI initiatives at The New York Times; Swati Sharma, editor-in-chief of Vox; Sally Buzbee, news editor for the US and Canada at Reuters: Miki Toliver King, managing director of news partnerships for North America at Google; and Ryan Merkley, chief operating officer at NPR. Here’s a summary of the event.

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1. A desire for connection

Some of the changes highlighted in the report, such as high levels of news avoidance among young people and growing attention for news creators, point to “a desire to feel connection and a call for content,” said NPR’s Merkley.

This feeling was echoed by Buzbee, who pointed to Reuters experiments with video explainers on complicated topics such as Taiwan and said it’s reassuring to know that behind changes in format preferences, audiences are still seeking out news. 

“It is so heartening that people, at a minimum, are still saying that they're looking for good information, that is a hopeful signal,” Buzbee said. “But are we standing in our own way, are we doing things the wrong way?” She stressed that news publishers have to respond with innovative formats, even if they might look like small steps in comparison with the overarching changes to the information ecosystem.

Responding to audiences’ need for local news, for example, is an important way to reconnect with audiences and build closer relationships with them. In the case of NPR, which provides both national-level news coverage and manages a large network of local radio stations, this takes the shape of using audience data to integrate stories local to people in their app and website experience. 

“Part of NPR’s secret sauce is that connection to community and its ability to tell a humane and contextualised story that feels like it meets you where you are,” Merkley said. “We are in a human minority-internet right now. That's the place we're moving to. We need to be curious and experimental about new ways to build connections with the audience, and to listen to what folks are telling us. They want to have that connection. They want trust. They're looking for context.”

2. The shift to platforms

The Digital News Report 2026 exposed an important milestone. For the first time since we started measuring, social media and video networks are, on average across the 48 markets covered, more popular than both TV and publishers’ news websites and apps as news sources. This means that audiences now have a more incidental relationship with news, coming across it while looking at other content in one of these networks. 

As the chart below shows, the difference is even higher in the United States, where 56% of our respondents use social media for news, much more than TV and news websites (both at 45%). 

Devichand, from the New York Times, stressed that the world of platforms has changed significantly in the past ten years, with platforms now offering different experiences and not prioritising news as much as they did before. This doesn’t mean publishers should ignore them, he said, as it’s important to create interactions with trust-worthy journalism in those spaces but also on their own websites. 

“One of the responses for us has been to double down on being a destination of our own experience and that can't be static,” said Devichand, who called on media managers to “take a step towards the best of this new internet.” 

But what do the platforms make of all this? Toliver King from Google said the company is speaking with publishers about surfacing high-quality content for audiences coming through Google’s platforms. She explained her company is trying to direct users who want more than a brief or surface-level answer toward publishers’ sites, despite fears in the industry about the loss of traffic for the rise of AI Overviews, the AI-generated summaries that now appear on Google search. 

“Publishers do have to think about the readers that are the more sophisticated, that want deep answers to their questions, because those are the readers that are going to be coming directly to their sites,” Toliver King said. 

This shift to platforms should not be blamed for declining trust in journalism, said Sharma from Vox. She argued that trust is also low because many newsrooms may be out of touch with audiences outside media elites, and pointed to polarising issues like Gaza and immigration as important examples. 

“Are we really understanding what people are feeling? Or are we just serving elite audiences in our bubble?” she said. 

3. The challenge from news creators

The Digital News Report 2026 has reflected a key change in audience behaviour: with fewer people trusting traditional news media, more people are turning to content creators to get their news. Is this good or bad news for the organisations represented at the panel?

While people’s expectations around news are changing, NPR’s Merkley said, the rise of personality-led consumption shows that the demand for news is still there. 

“What I take from that is a desire to feel connection and a call for content,” he said. “[Creators] often build their videos and their engagement on top of reporting done by the kinds of folks in this room, and they often attribute it. Audiences are feeling that confidence because they are getting both the human delivery that they seek, but they're also getting the credibility of the outlets that are doing the reporting.”

Sharma pointed to a paradox hidden in the report: audiences say they want impartial news, but many of the creators they follow are openly opinionated or have a clear point of view. The reason might be that people are not only looking for neutrality, but also for a relationship, some personality, and a sense of connection. Newsrooms need to find ways to build similar audience relationships without abandoning journalistic values.

“I do believe in what I call curiosity-driven journalism: how we can create relationships with people without necessarily doing what creators are doing in the space? And how we can still form those relationships while understanding the role journalism should play?” said Sharma. 

Merkley agreed: curiosity and innovation should drive journalism in the future, especially as the traditional models it’s relied on until now continue to weaken. “The big takeaway is that things we’ve counted on for the last decade are going away,” he said.

Publishers are testing different approaches in response to the changes in audience behaviour. 

Vox’s content is designed around accessibility and news overload. One example is ‘The Log Off’ newsletter,which brings readers a summary of what Donald Trump has done each day in 300 words or less and, if there aren’t significant new developments, it just tells them to log off. 

The other disruptive force in journalism in 2026 is Generative AI. Despite the ongoing conflict between publishers and platforms on issues such as copyright, our panellists agreed journalists should keep exploring AI uses to expand and develop their work. “Holding that technology at arm's length is a recipe for failure,” said Devichand, who pointed to the New York Times’ experimentation with this technology, either by interrogating large datasets such as the Epstein Files or to improve accessibility and user experience on its platforms.

In a world of AI slop, Devichand said, the New York Times has also leant into emphasising the human side of its work. “The other big response,” he said, “even though I'm now an AI guy, is actually humanity.”