Our podcast: Digital News Report 2026. Episode 1: What you need to know

In this opening episode of our Digital News Report 2026 series, we explore the major trends around how people are consuming news around the world. We look at the dominance of platforms as a source of news, how people are using AI, declining trust and interest in news, the role of news influencers, subscription trends and much more.

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Speakers

Jim Egan is the lead author of the Digital News Report 2026 and is a senior research associate at the Reuters Institute.

Richard Fletcher is a co-author of the Digital News Report and is the Director of Research at the Reuters Institute.

Host Mitali Mukherjee is the Director of the Reuters Institute and is a political economy journalist with more than two decades of experience in TV, print and digital journalism.

Transcript

The ongoing shift towards platforms | How AI is being used for news | Declining interest in news | News avoidance | Trust in news down | Satisfaction with coverage of big news stories | The role of news creators | Who's paying for news | Reasons for hope

The ongoing shift towards platforms ↑

Mitali: Maybe we'll start, Jim, with you as lead author to give us a bit of a 360-view on this, and the first one, and the big one that I think we've drawn a lot of attention to in the report is what we call platformisation. Why don't you walk listeners and viewers through this, and what it means?

Jim: Yeah, platformisation definitely emerges as one of the big themes this year. To put it in slightly more everyday language, I think what we're seeing here is the continuation of a long-term trend of reducing reliance on direct forms of news access through sources like TV news, and so on, and increasing reliance on third-party platforms and sources, such as social media and video networks, in particular. It's tempting to talk about this as a shift, but I prefer to talk more about a drift away from those traditional platforms in favour of social media and video networks, partly because that's what the data says. So, social media has grown a bit this year, but not very much. It's at least as much about the reduction in usage, not just of TV news, but I think something which has been less widely talked about is the reduction of traffic and usage of owned and operated news websites and apps.

Mitali: Let's walk through that a bit, Jim. Both in terms of the drift that you point to and the trajectory that things have taken almost post-Covid, where we began to see the first signs of this, and as we stand here and now, and I think we saw signs of it in a few markets last year, but it's in more full form this year, where social and video platforms are actually overtaking other forms online, which is news websites and others.

Jim: Yeah, so this year 30 of our 48 markets show social media and video networks being ahead of owned news websites and apps. There is some regional concentration of that. So, if we talk about those 30 markets being almost two thirds, those are mainly in the Americas, both North and South, in Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and really it's mainly in Europe, that you still see news websites and apps being more widely used than social media and video networks, but there are exceptions to that in places like Singapore, Taiwan, and Japan, for example.

Mitali: And maybe it's important to draw here as well the demographic variations of what we are seeing, and we've been tracking that, and I think it is a question that's top of mind for a lot of news organisations. What's happening with the younger audiences?

Jim: Yeah, there are demographic variations, although I mean, I should say that this drift away from those traditional sources is universal across, across the age groups, with the sole exception of people over 55 whose usage of news websites and apps hasn't changed over the last five years, but if you look at the youngest of the audiences on our survey, so 52% of people aged under 24 are now saying that their main way of coming to news is on social media and video networks, and that's 32 percentage points ahead of the second preferred source, which is news websites and apps, so it's really stark for younger audiences, but as I say, this change in consumption behaviour has happened right across the age spectrum. In fact, it is now no longer the case that you see news websites and apps being the preferred source for any single age group, so if you're 55 and over on the global average level, you prefer TV. If you're under 55 it's social media and video networks.

Mitali: Yeah, and I think that is a quite big takeaway for news organisations. But if we were to pass what's happening on these third party platforms a bit more, Jim, because some of this is sort of known to the news industries, and take the fact that there is a lot of traffic moving to these third-party platforms, what do we see in terms of which platforms stand out versus the others?

Jim: We talk about social media and video networks as a sort of collective grouping for all of these platforms. What we've seen in recent years, particularly since Covid, is the rise and rise of these video networks, in particular. So, the two fastest growing have been TikTok and Instagram, YouTube growing less, but not because it's in decline, it's because it's an extremely large platform, particularly in the global south, but also in other markets as well, and it's really those three in terms of being platforms for the both production, distribution, and consumption of video news content that are the real growth stories recently. Although I should say that this year we've seen Facebook appearing to return to growth in terms of news consumption, and that to a degree is contrary to what many news media execs have told us about Facebook being something that they're deprioritising,

Mitali: But if we were to think about what's happening in the background in terms of algorithmic decisions, some of it ties in, doesn't it, with Facebook making that express decision to shift a little bit more towards news, but as you said, that heat map shows very clearly what's happening with platforms like YouTube and Instagram, so very much video first. Just a quick word, Jim. On the other parameter that we track, which is search as a gateway for news. Any quick highlights from there?

Jim: Well, yeah, I mean the quick highlights are for younger people. We have seen search go down this year, so younger people seem to be using search as a gateway a bit less than other forms, whether that's going direct or using newsletters, alerts, and so on, and so forth, it's largely unchanged for people aged 35 and above. We haven't seen much change in search, but I'm only talking here about consumer behaviour. So, what happens in terms of where people get referred onto, sort of on that distribution side of things, we're not able to track in our survey, so people using search a little bit less does not mean that search referrals are staying the same.

How AI chatbots are being used for news ↑

Mitali: Yeah, the other big pillar, Richard, has been AI for a lot of news organisations. What have we found from last year to now in terms of audiences leaning into or leaning towards AI search bots for news.

Richard: Well, in some of our other research last year, we found that around a third of people say that they're using AI chatbots on a weekly basis, and that was last year. So, it's probably gone up a little bit since then. Within that group, the dominant use case is now getting information - that's what people are using AI for predominantly. And, of course, part of that is news, so in our data this year, 10% on average across the markets that we looked at said that they used an AI chatbot for news in the last week, and this is up from 7% last year, so three percentage poins growth, but it's a clear signal, I think, but at the same time, it's also clear that it's still quite a niche source of news for now, and even for those that use it, is one that tends to play a supplementary role in their news consumption, one that they use alongside other sources. Very few people in our data say that they're solely reliant on AI chatbots for news, for example.

Mitali: What more can we find in terms of what this audience group looks like that's turning to AI chatbots, Richard, and sort of an additional question to that, how did they feel about this journey through AI chatbots on parameters like trust?

Richard: Well, certainly the user base is younger, so those aged 18 to 24 are three times more likely than those over 55 to say they use AI chatbots for news. The user base is also skewed towards those who are highly interested in news, are already consuming news in lots of different ways, and are generally just more kind of engaged with society. They're also more comfortable with technology, which is again something we found in our other research. In terms of trust, though, I think, although trust levels in general, I think we'll come on to this later, are relatively low when it comes to news, they tend to be even lower for the use of platforms, and AI chat bots are a form of platform, and trust is in news from AI platforms is also quite low.

Mitali: And if we were to look at this specific user, what would we be able to gage in terms of their news diet, because I know we've kind of termed them the power news consumers, so it's someone who's quite informed and quite tapped into the news, isn't it?

Richard: Yeah, I think I think that's true, you can start to see this when you look at the ways in which they're using AI for news, this is one of the questions that we asked in the survey, and of course, some people are using it to get the latest headlines. AI can do that now. It can deliver a kind of summary of the list of headlines, but of course, there's lots of other things that it can, in theory, do as well. So it can provide summarisation, it can help people navigate the news, it can make news easier to understand, and I think this is something that we see respondents doing as well. And again, I think this fits in with the idea that these are sort of highly engaged news consumers, typically who might have follow-up questions, you might want to use AI to get something from news that they're not currently able to get from other platforms.

Declining interest in news ↑

Mitali: Yeah, and not quite the polar opposite, Jim, but at the other end of the sliding scale is news interest, and those who express either interest in news or, as the case may be, sliding interest in news. What did we find there?

Jim: Well, I think again, this is continuation of a trend that interest in news overall does continue to drop, and over the last five years it's dropped by about 15 percentage points on average across our survey, so from being, you know, close to two thirds of people saying they're interested in use, it's now less than half, but I think there are reasons for that, both internal and external to the news news industry, I think as as platformisation has increased, you know, there are increasing, very evident, prominent demands on people's time and other sources of content clamouring for people's attention on the mobile phone, but events influence things as well, I think, a little bit, and throughout the survey this year, you can see people expressing a degree of disillusionment and anxiety, and for some that means just being less interested in the news.

Mitali: And I think a lot of the data, and we will come to that in our conversation, sort of reflects that level of volatility and flux, and I think this unease with what's happening with the broader political environment, as it may be, what's a possible way for news organisations to think about these categories of users, because we've pointed to three specific categories in terms of those who are super interested in the news and then tuned out.

Jim: Yeah, well, I mean, the way the data has been tracked in the Digital News Report for a while has been basically according to people's interest in news and their frequency of consumption of it, so those two things, and we have three named segments, so news lovers, the people who are most interested in their consuming news most frequently, daily briefers, kind of speaks for itself, and then casual users are people who, frankly, are not very interested in the news and don't don't consume very much of it, and we've seen the composition of those segments change over the last few, few years. So, news lovers are now down to about between 20 and 25% of the audience, and the people who were casual users only used to be 16% of the total audience, and is now about a quarter. One thing worth noting is that among those news lovers, even though there are fewer of them, indicators of loyalty, engagement, enthusiasm, and so on are holding up, and they're sort of undiminished. So the extent to which this is a problem depends on your vantage point, where you are in the industry, but if you're, if you're a commercial news provider, very focused on your monetisation strategy, and so on and so forth, there may be a smaller population of those news lovers, but they are people who appear to be at least as enthusiastic as they used to be about what you might be offering.

News avoidance ↑

Mitali: And then, somewhat related, another metric that we've been tracking for some years now is news avoidance, and to be clear, this is sort of as much an attitude as it is a behaviour. What do we see this year with news avoidance, specifically?,

Jim: Interestingly, at the global level, it's basically unchanged news avoidance this year. So, 42% of people saying that they sometimes or often avoid the news. If you look back to 2017 when we first started tracking it, I think the figure was 29% so there has been a significant increase there. It's not the same in all markets, so for example, in some of our Nordic markets, so Denmark and Norway, we saw quite significant increases in news avoidance this year, which may be to do with the news flow and news stories that were under underway at the time, but overall news avoidance is unchanged this year.

Trust in news down ↑

Mitali: Richard, just picking up from the point that Jim and I were talking about, in terms of this flux in the environment, in a higher degree of uncertainty in people's lives, either, you know, personally or more broadly with the countries that they live in. We have seen an impact this year on trusting news metrics. Why don't you walk us through what the findings are?

Richard: Yeah, so I mean we've been tracking trust now for about 10 years, and over that time in the countries where we've got data from 10 years ago compared to now, the sort of long term picture is one of decline, but when you look at a bit more detail well, there are sort of patterns within that, so we saw pre-pandemic quite a steep decline in trust in news in many countries, and then during the pandemic there was an uptick, it was quite a brief one, and then in many countries after that there was a period of stability, and that's what we've seen for the last few years, and this year was the first time in the last couple of years where we've seen a clear decline in trust, so 37% this year said that they trust most news most of the time. The figure was 40% last year in the year before that as well. I think more striking than that, though, is also what we see in the data is that in 29 out of the 48 markets that we, that we cover, there was a statistically significant decline this year, and in just one country there was a significant increase, and I think that gives you an idea of how kind of broad based this sort of trend is, rather than ho steep it is on average, you know, there always are differences by region when it comes to trust, and the kind of basic pattern that we've documented in previous reports still holds. So, in Northern Europe, trust in news is quite high. It tends to be lowest in parts of Southern and Eastern Europe, and then you have kind of in the middle, Western Europe, Latin America, and Asia. That pattern still holds, but I said the picture is one of decline this year.

Mitali: Yeah, and I think it's worth mentioning this is the lowest reading in terms of trust in news since we started measuring this metric, isn't it?

Richard: Yeah, that's right.

Mitali: Is there a way to, and it sort of speaks to what we're seeing in some other findings, the freedom of press index, for example, where for them as well this is the lowest in 25 years… Many countries have now shifted into the dangerous or very dangerous category. Is there a way to sort of separate out how people are feeling about trust in institutions broadly versus what's happening with trust in news more specifically?

Richard: Well, it's really tough actually to do that, and you need kind of special types of data to really pull apart differences of things that might be happening simultaneously, and trying to say, well, what's the cause and effect relationship here? And I think to me it's likely that there's a range of different factors play, and I think some of those probably directly connected to the media, such as the sources that people are using, and others are a bit more indirect, so where they think society is heading, what they think about world events in a kind of general sense might have an impact on on trust in news. I mean, research has shown that there is quite a strong link between trust in politics, for example, and trust in the news. So it seems reasonable to me that you would expect that link to, you know, exist also between trust in news and trust in other institutions in society, perhaps even interpersonal trust as well, but it's really difficult at a kind of global level to pick those apart.

Mitali: Yeah, and one of the other things we have attempted to do in our report, Richard, is also draw the correlation in terms of trust between gateways and trust levels themselves, where there is a slight difference in terms of those accessing news via these third-party platforms, and what it does to trust levels.

Richard: That's right. Yeah, I mean, we've seen in the past that trust in platforms as a source of news tends to be lower than trust in news in general, particularly when it comes to social media, and we also know from looking at the data over time, in one piece of analysis we did, we showed that trust in news has declined more in countries where social media news use has grown the most, so we can start to see some patterns already building on that this year. What we also saw is that when we measure trust in individual news brands, what we see is, while trust is decreasing for some brands as well, in most cases the declines are not as steep as what we see for trust in news in general. So, what we think might be happening is that as social media becomes more central to people's news use over time, and at the same time big brands are becoming a bit more marginal to people's news use, less central themselves, this might be part of the reason why we're seeing this sort of steeper decline in overall trust in news versus trust in news brands,

Mitali: And of course we haven't mentioned it in detail, but again the political realities that many of these countries with large young audiences, high social media usage, also have, a situation where there are far greater attacks on independent media, and there are sort of clamps that exist on critical media, and that's probably playing into this entire cocktail as well.

Richard: Yeah, it's not something we measured this year, but we have seen in previous reports that media criticism, or the level of media criticism that exists in a country, does seem to relate to low levels of trust in news.

Satisfaction with coverage of big news stories ↑

Mitali: Yeah, it's also not been quiet here in terms of news stories, Jim. In fact, quite the opposite of it. And that's something we attempted to do this year, isn't it? Sort of track how audiences feel about some very big, very high-profile stories, and how they felt the coverage was.

Jim: Yeah, yeah, that's right. So, as well as asking about organiaations, we asked about six individual long-running news stories, which I think, by and large, you can describe as global stories. So we asked people whether they thought the news media was doing a good or a bad job in covering inflation, the cost of living in covering conflicts in Ukraine and also in the Middle East, specifically Gaza at the time of the of the field work, asking people the same question about climate change, also about Donald Trump's second presidency and immigration as well. Now again, kind of, you need to read the report to see how those responses vary on a national basis, but I think one thing that comes out is that generally speaking, audiences are not very happy with the way those stories are being being covered, particularly in North America and in much of Europe as well, and I would say of all of those, there are a few which really come out as being stories that are kind of like provoking audience dissatisfaction. The conflict in the Middle East was one, in some countries coverage of climate change was another, but it's really migration that stands out as being the one that is extremely difficult, it seems, for news providers to get right, so on a global average basis, 11 percentage points worth of people thought news media is doing a bad job rather than a good job of covering migration, and when you cut that data in different ways, you can see some really sort of stark differences of opinion, especially if you look at a story like migration by political leaning, for example, so some really interesting things popping out there despite the fact that I think lots of news audiences continue to be supportive of the idea of what news could be, the way news is is unsatisfactory for a number of them.

Mitali: Any examples to share from the US, for example, which has traditionally had a quite kind of polarised cut to it, left and right.

Jim: Yeah, the US is definitely divided on political lines on most of those stories. It's people on the right who are least satisfied with the way Donald Trump's second presidency is being covered by the news in the UK, for example. You see people both on the left and the right being unhappy with the way migration is being covered, in particular on the left, which to some people may be somewhat surprising. Now, political affiliation and leanings is not the only way of cutting this, that if you look at where people are consuming those stories in terms of the platforms, the more people are using traditional platforms, and I'm going to talk about news websites and apps as a traditional platform in this context, but in particular on TV, the happier people seem to be with the way those stories are being being covered. Trust in news overall is also a differentiating factor. So, generally speaking, and I think we have an example on France specifically, if people in France trust news, they're broadly happy with how these stories are being covered. If they don't trust news, they're broadly unhappy, with one exception again, migration. Even people who trust news in France generally are unhappy with the way the migration story is being done.

The role of news creators ↑

Mitali: I am looping back to the point about news interest, and then more broadly about these platforms, because the other sort of running theme for the last year or two for news organisations is making sense of the news creator universe, Jim, which is, do we partner with them? Do we model our journalists to sort of emulate them, or are they wholly, you know, this entity that is completely different from what mainstream news thinks about? What do we know of how audiences can and do engage, or turn to news creators?

Jim: Yes, we asked people about creators this year, both in terms of their consumption of creators, and also what they think about creators, compared to traditional established legacy media. 27% of people across our survey sample say that they're consuming some content from news creators each each week, and these are creators who are focused mainly on on provision and commentary of of news, but the then, which I think is really interesting data is well, to what extent is this 27% of people displacing and replacing conventional news coverage, and I think the broad answer to that is not very much, actually, so on average when we say to people to what extent are these news creators fulfilling all of your news needs to the extent you don't need anything else? Only 13% of people are saying most or all of my news needs are met by news creators. And then, if we drill down again to a smaller segment, and we ask people, are you solely relying on news creators for all of your news needs, only 3% of people globally are saying that that is what they are doing. So it looks as though creator usage is sitting alongside people's other consumption of news, and on average people who are using creators consume more traditional news sources than people who aren't.

Who's paying for news ↑

Mitali: So complementary rather than sort of abandoning one whole way of looking to the news, Richard, if they're on third-party platforms and they're not turning to the news websites. What does that mean in terms of paying for news, which in any case is sort of a slightly leaner, narrower basket to begin with.

Richard:  Yeah, I mean, what we've seen this year is that the proportion of people who say that they've paid for online news in some form in the last year is basically unchanged at 17% This includes all forms of payment, by the way, so we're not just measuring ongoing digital subscriptions, there's also donations and other forms of payment that are included in that, and the basic pattern that we see on the national level is similar as well, so the Nordic countries' payment level is much higher.  Norway in particular, 40% of people said that they paid for online news in the last year, but in many countries, including the UK, France, Germany, Canada, the figure is closer to 10% so and again that hasn't really changed in many of these markets in the last few years.

Mitali: Is it emerging as a sort of a ceiling that seems to have set itself in place in terms of news payment at this point?

Richard: I think it's possible. I think that it may be linked to some of the changes that Jim was talking about at the beginning, but I think the evidence from, you know, as I mentioned, from the Nordic suggests that ceiling is, can be very different in different parts of the world.

Mitali: Are there a few models that emerge in terms of what's working, you know, because there's bundling that's been attempted, there's sort of bunging in other things like crosswords, cooking, all of that, so there's that alternative as well,

Richard: We did ask some questions on this this year, and we do see that among those among those that pay, the most likely sort of way of paying is giving money to a traditional or legacy news organisation, so around, well, it's more than half, actually, that said that amongst those that paid that said they paid in that way, and then if you compare that to the sort of 10 or 20% that said that they paid, for example, money to a digital born news outlet, you can kind of see the difference. And of course you know if people are paying money to a legacy news organisation, it's often in the form of an ongoing digital subscription, but again, one example we bring out in the report that shows how this can vary nationally is that if we contrast the UK with France, so in the UK 80% of those that pay said that they're doing this by paying money to a traditional publisher, often in the form of an ongoing subscription, whereas in France the proportion paying to a digital-born outlet is much closer to the proportion paying for access to a legacy publisher.

Mitali: One question that is fascinating, and comes before the how do we get them to pay, is why do they feel the need to pay and subscribe to news. What do we have in terms of colour there?

Richard: Well, I mean, the single most common motivation is simply people want to get access to content they can't access in another way, and we can think of these as kind of a direct benefit, so people, you know, kind of satisfying a specific need that they, that they have, and these tend to be more cited as reasons than, for example, more sort of socially oriented benefits, like wanting to support journalism, because they think it's good for society. These do feature in the data, but overall they feature to a sort of smaller extent. Of course, some people are motivated by a mixture of both, and it is difficult sometimes to ask people to sort of specify their motivations for something they've already done. One other thing that we bring out in the report, which was, I think, was a bit of a surprise to us, was that in countries where payment levels are, are a bit higher, like the Nordic countries, these social motivations don't actually feature as strongly as the, as the more kind of direct motivations, and you know, it's not completely clear why that is, but it may be, you know, in addition to the issues around financial sustainability, it could be that just people don't perceive journalism as being under threat in quite the same way, and therefore not necessarily something that needs needs supporting through through donations.

Mitali: Because interestingly it's a bit different in a market like Canada isn't in terms of what people's motivations are, it's far more social in that sense.

Richard: Yeah, exactly. So by contrast, in some parts of the world, you do see people more motivated by these kinds of social reasons, and it's not always, Canada's a good example, it's not always to do with press freedom and it can come through.

Reasons for hope ↑

Mitali: We've always thought, I think, of the Digital News Report as a barometer, a weather vane of sorts. So, pointing to where things are trending, pointing to the shifts, if you will, pointing to the drifts as you did. What would you say are the big takeaways for you that you think the news industry could think about from the Digital News Report 2026 because there's quite a lot to unpack. What's a good way to think about it, and to look at both the realities of a changed environment, but also the points of hope?

Jim: Yeah, well, it is. It is a year of instability, and I'm saying that in a narrow sense. We've seen a lot of the data move  this year, but I think that's reflecting a wider feeling of instability as well, so that a lot of turbulence and sort of volatility in the data echoing people's uncertainty about, you know, really dramatic changes that are happening in the world around them, we said, you know, as we've been discussing, interest in news is going down. Arguably, you might say that actually interest in news is holding up pretty well, given how much consumption is happening on people's mobile phones, and how many other more straightforwardly entertaining opportunities there are for people to spend, spend that, spend their time on online. I think that what we see about creators is something which, as I say, is broadly complementary and is injecting new life, new freshness, new interest into the news experience for many people. So, I think established news media has at least as much to learn and to emulate in an appropriate way, as they do, to be sort of rivalrous and sort of envious of the creative sector.

There are challenges, I think, for regulators and policy makers as much as there are for media operators here, because how do you strike the right balance in terms of national legislation and regulatory measures in areas such as online privacy and online safety, at a time when people are spending more and more of their time on these platforms, but also the mood seems to be darkening around them, but I think one point that Richard mentioned earlier, that I think you know news organisations should really, really focus on even though unraveling the statistical causes of it is quite difficult, is although trust in news and the information environment is going down, trust in news organisations appears to be holding up as brands themselves, and that's together with what we have about ongoing support for impartiality, ongoing positive attitudes towards the social role that public service media can play markets around the world. That to me feels like a call to action, and rather than people sort of dwelling too much on the sort of bleakness and the difficulty and the challenges in this data to perhaps say to ourselves, well, actually, good news media is needed more than ever at this particularly uncertain time. 

Mitali: And that there's not so much ‘this and that’. We're looking at quite a bit of conformity across audiences. For a time, it was sort of like young audiences existed in on an island of their own, but now we're beginning to see similar trends in terms of their preferences, their gateways, all of it. 

Jim: Yeah, I think that's right. Although, you know, we've - there's been a debate in the news industry for a while about will younger audiences turn into and acquire and grow up into their older counterparts. I think actually perhaps you're seeing older audiences becoming more like younger ones. 

Mitali: So not quite subscribing to the newspaper yet. Gentlemen, thank you both for your work on this. That is a wrap on this discussion.