Our podcast: Digital News Report 2026. Episode 3: What the decline of old media can teach us

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Speakers

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.

The transcript

The decline off offline media | Variations in decline | Differences by age | What this means for news websites

The decline off offline media ↑

Mitali: It's a gloomy headline, but we'll try and unpack it right from the get-go. Let's first start by looking at offline media, Richard, by which we're talking about television, newspapers and radio. As I said, this is the fifteenth edition and this is something we've been tracking for a while now. What did you want to understand about this downward trend that we've been seeing in offline media?

Richard: I think most listeners by now know that offline sources of news like TV, newspapers and radio are all in decline in terms of weekly reach. So, the number of people that say they use them on a weekly basis. And we can clearly see that from the trend lines that we've built up over the last fifteen years or so on this project. But I think one of the limitations of this is that the trend lines on their own don't really tell us too much about the underlying dynamics. So, what might be causing these trends and also why some sources are losing audiences faster than others?

Mitali: It's a good idea to think about where it started and where it's got to, to understand what the decline has looked like. Richard, can you talk a little bit about that in terms of what the peaks look like and what the level of decline has been for offline media?

Richard: In the chapter, we pick out just four countries as examples: Brazil, Japan, the UK and the US. In each of these cases, we can quite clearly see that offline sources are already less widely used than online sources, for example. And this has been the case now for a few years. If we just use the UK as one example, we can see that in the case of newspapers, around one in ten say that they now use them on a weekly basis as a source of news, and this is down from around sixty percent back in 2013. Twenty-five percent, so around a quarter, say that they use radio news, and this is down from forty percent just over ten years ago. And in the case of TV, roughly half of people still say that they are using TV news on a weekly basis, but this is down from eighty percent in 2013. So, quite substantial double-digit percentage point declines in all cases for offline media.

Mitali: Is there very significant country variation as well in these levels of usage?

Richard: There are always differences by country. Some countries, for example Germany, have more traditional media habits in general and therefore the use of offline sources tends to be a little bit higher than in the UK, especially when it comes to TV. Then you've got countries like Japan which have specific national circumstances. Newspaper circulation in Japan is still pretty high for various reasons. But I think it's also true that in basically every market that we look at this basic pattern of decline around offline news use is the same. And it's something that we see pretty much universally.

Variations in decline ↑

Mitali: What was fascinating, though, Richard, was the different dynamics that played out in these three pillars. I know they sometimes get clubbed together when we talk about traditional news sources, but it has played out quite differently, hasn't it, in newspapers, radio and television?

Richard: Yeah. And this is really the focus of the chapter in the report. And just before getting to what we found, I can say a little bit about how we got there. So this year, we asked a new question to those people in the survey who said that they're currently not using each of these offline sources on a weekly basis. In short, what we did was ask them a follow-up question which said: well, if you don't use it now, is it because you used to use it but you've stopped, or is it because you've never used this source on a weekly basis? What this data allows us to do is work out which sources have what we call high adoption rates. So, in other words, how many people have ever used them on a regular basis. Even if they've stopped now, they might have used them in the past. And then retention rates, which is the proportion of those that did adopt the source and who are still using it today. We think this is useful because it can shed some light on whether a source is in decline because it's failing to recruit users or whether it's in decline because it's recruiting them, but then failing to hold on to them as regular users. When we look at the data for different sources, this does actually allow us to see some fundamental differences between print, TV and radio. In the case of newspapers, they tend to have weak adoption rates and weaker retention rates. So, in other words, they've not been able to recruit new users. And even among those that did adopt newspapers as a source, around three-quarters are now lapsed users. So they have a problem with adoption and a problem with retention. Radio is in a similar position: weak adoption rates and weak retention rates, although retention has been a little better for radio than it has been for newspapers. So there is a slight difference there. But then TV is different again because TV has quite high adoption rates, actually. Averaging across forty-five markets, eighty percent of people say that at one point they have been a regular TV news user. But retention is lower. So for TV, the primary cause of the decline is this failure to hold on to users, as reflected in this relatively weak retention rate.

Differences by age ↑

Mitali: We have, through the course of this report, Richard, of course, looked at how some of these metrics sit against different age groups in terms of both these adoption and retention approaches. What kind of variation did we see across ages? Intuitively, you would think there is a mismatch between young audiences and newspaper usage, but detail that for people listening.

Richard: That's basically what we find. So if we look at younger people, we can see an even bleaker picture when it comes to newspapers and radio in terms of adoption. Fewer young people, compared to older people, say they've ever used these news sources on a weekly basis. And I think that's probably something we would have expected. I think it gets a bit more interesting when we look at TV, because when we look at TV and compare the under-thirty-fives with the over-thirty-fives, we see considerably lower retention rates amongst younger people, while the adoption rates are actually quite similar. So, in other words, we can see that the decline in TV news use is not really about young people having never adopted the medium. It's really about young people who used to use it but have now stopped. And that's one of the key causes of the decline in television news use. That's slightly different from what we see when it comes to newspapers and radio, which have never really been able to recruit young people as users in the first place.

What this means for the future of news ↑

Mitali: There is a fourth separate and important category, Richard. And this has been pointed to in our executive summary as well for the report, which is that people are now getting a greater share of news on social media and video networks, and less so on dedicated news websites and apps. What can we understand from these findings in terms of where things may be pointing for news websites and apps? Are they going in the direction of these three traditional sources? What did we find on adoption and retention there?

Richard: I think the short answer to that is yes. When we look at the data for news websites and apps, we see that they have a similar adoption-retention profile to television news. So, relatively high levels of adoption, and then declines that we are seeing in many countries, which may come as a surprise to some listeners. But news websites and apps are in decline in many cases. These declines seem to be primarily driven, again, by a failure to retain audiences that were regular users at one point in the past. And again, when we split the data by age, we see pretty much identical rates of adoption for the eighteen-to-thirty-fours and the thirty-five-and-overs, but retention rates are ten percentage points lower amongst younger people compared to older people. So again, as with television news, declines in the use of news websites and apps seem to be driven by the loss of younger former users.

Mitali: One of the key takeaways here, Richard, is that there are different reasons for this drop in different categories, based on adoption and retention. Television has been a great example that you've pointed to. Did the findings from this year's study dispel any misconceptions about the evolving news consumption landscape? And I suppose I'm specifically tilting towards news websites and apps while asking this.

Richard: I think this data helps us understand a little bit more about these broader trends. But of course, there are lots of unanswered questions still, and we can look at those in future years. But one thing it does help to do, I think, is challenge the idea that younger people might eventually, as they get older, grow into the media habits of their parents' generation. And I think our data suggests that this probably isn't going to happen. Partly this is to do with a slight misunderstanding about what older people are doing now when it comes to news. And one of the points we make in the report is that, if anything, they're adopting the habits of younger people rather than the other way around. More broadly, I think it's important to remember that older people, if they are consuming traditional media, are not doing so simply because of their age. It's primarily because their generation and people who were born at the same time were socialised into specific consumption patterns and preferences. And that, to me, is a much more important factor than just purely people's age at a given time as to why they consume news media in the way that they do.

Mitali: This is a little bit of looking into the future, which is hard to do for data scientists. But is there anything that you've looked at in the last thirteen years, Richard, that points to future news habits? Because I think one of the points that you raised in your chapter as well is that in many cases, it's less about growth on some of these social media platforms and more about a fall in existing news websites, etc., in terms of that crossover that we've seen for audiences.

Richard: I think that's right. One of the key findings in the report is that the emergence of social media as the dominant source of news is not necessarily a story just about social media's growth. It's also about the decline of not only offline media, but also online news websites and apps. And I think that points to a general trend away from news use and an increase in news avoidance, or just not using any kind of news at all. That's the bigger underlying trend, I think. I mean, you're right that it's difficult to predict the future, but I think it's also worth remembering that the declines we're seeing around traditional media in particular are driven by much broader and quite profound changes to the information environment. And that's really not going to go away. In general, the trend lines that we've built up over the last thirteen years or so are really a result of these changes, or part of these changes, and I think they're really unlikely to be reversed when it comes to traditional media. I think where the uncertainty lies is what might emerge. We've seen AI chatbot news use grow this year, for example, but it still remains to be seen how that will take shape in the coming years. So where there's uncertainty is not about the decline of certain sources. It's about what, if anything, will take its place.

Mitali: A not-small question for publishers to think about. Richard, thanks very much for joining the podcast today.

Richard: Thank you.