Director of Research Richard Fletcher on the Reuters Institute's research in 2025-26

From our Annual Report 2025-26

Our research helps journalists and editors across the world navigate a complex and changing media environment, while also addressing the questions that matter most to media and communication scholars. Our goal is to provide timely, accessible, evidence-based independent analysis of issues facing journalism and news media, published in the form of Reuters Institute's factsheets and reports, peer-reviewed journal articles, and books.

Our flagship publication is the annual Digital News Report, which explores how people get news in different countries, and how that is changing across 48 markets. The 2026 report was the first to be authored by Jim Egan, a leading industry expert on the international news media. We also launched a new ‘interactive’ section of the Digital News Report website, which allows users to explore the key data points over time and in different countries, furthering our efforts to make the data as widely accessible as possible.

In September 2025 we published the second report from our project on AI and the Future of News. The report (based on data from the UK, USA, Denmark, France, Argentina, and Japan) documented the sharp growth in public uptake of generative AI tools, but also how the public remain cautious about the use of AI in the newsroom – something we also found to be true of UK journalists in a report published two months later.

In March 2026 we published a report on young people and news. The report, which draws on data from our various audience research projects (primarily the Digital News Reports), summarises ten years of insights into how young people get news, with the aim of bringing together separate findings and presenting them in a single, clearer narrative.

We also published separate reports on the rise of individual news creators, and relatedly, the changing shape of news podcasting. Both reports were authored by Nic Newman, who continues to work with us after stepping back as lead author of the Digital News Report.

A sample of our research from the last year is included on the following pages. Many Reuters Institute's publications are available for free download from our website. Hard copies can be purchased via our partner publisher, Columbia University Press, Amazon, other booksellers, or the University of Oxford online store.