Trends in digital news consumption have important health implications, at a time of widespread concern about polarisation and mistrust, the unaccountability of digital platforms, and the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) upon news and information systems.
Melissa Sweet writes:
The annual release of the Reuters Institute Digital News Report, with global and local editions, is closely watched for its insights into trends in digital news consumption and about issues such as misinformation.
The reports – released this week – contain much data that may be of use to the health sector, for informing communications strategies and for understanding the interplay between the digital news ecosystem and determinants of health.
Global trends of declining trust in media are, for example, linked to declining trust in other institutions, with obvious implications for public support for health interventions and evidence-based policymaking more broadly.
The 2026 report, produced globally by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at University of Oxford, and locally by the News and Media Research Centre at the University of Canberra with Google, says it marks a significant milestone: for the first time, social media and video network consumption is now the most widely used source of news globally (54% of all audiences).
Also for the first time, a majority of respondents now say they watch news online in every single market covered by the report, whether on news websites and apps or on social media and video networks.
Meanwhile, the proportion of Australians accessing news more than once a day has increased to 56 percent, up from 53 percent in 2025.
Ireland and Australia are the only two countries outside the Nordic countries where more than 20 percent of people pay for news. They are also the two countries where the proportion of people paying for news has grown the most since 2020.
The report identifies an apparent disconnect between the behaviour and attitudes of news consumers: news consumption continues to shift in favour of social media, video networks and AI, at the same time as concerns about trust in news, misinformation, and the wider impact of these platforms are all increasing.
Australians are more likely to say they are concerned about misinformation online than in previous years. Seventy-seven percent report being concerned about online misinformation – a three percentage point increase since 2025.
Launching the Australian report on 16 June, Vice-Chancellor of Canberra University Professor Bill Shorten called for a rethink of the regulatory landscape around digital platforms, saying that “Facebook is unaccountable”.
“We’ve moved beyond a fragmented news and media landscape into the wild west of media landscapes,” he said.
Shorten also flagged concerns about misinformation and disinformation, and the unaccountability of influencers at a time when traditional media is “beleaguered”.
During a panel discussion with media leaders at the launch, Tony Kendall, Managing Director of Australian Community Media, linked the contraction of regional newsrooms with the rise of One Nation and social media echo chambers.
He stressed the importance of keeping regional communities well informed by fact-checked, real news. The report shows regional communities are more dissatisfied with news – perhaps not surprising given the contractions in local reporting.
Australian findings
In Australia, news avoidance remains widespread, reported by more than two-thirds (68%) of respondents. It is especially high among women (71%), 18–24-year-olds (83%), and those who distrust news (80%).
However, more than one-third (35%) of news consumers access seven or more news brands each week.
Other findings from the Australian report include:
- Three-quarters believe media owners influence news coverage
- 60 percent of 18–24-year-olds have never read a printed newspaper
- 18–24-year-olds’ interest in news has risen sharply since 2024 (47%, +12 percentage points)
- Under 35s are more interested in politics than those aged 35+
- Nearly one in ten Australians now use generative AI chatbots for news (9%, +3 percentage points)
- AI news users value the chatbots’ ability to aggregate, explain, and simplify news; however, only 19 percent trust news from AI chatbots
- Social media (37%) and AI chatbots (38%) have lower rates of click-through to news sources compared to search engines (45%)
- Almost half (48%, +12 percentage points) of 18–24s use TikTok for news
- Podcast use is rising across the political spectrum, with increases among right-leaning (16%, +7 percentage points) and left-leaning audiences (18%, +4 percentage points)
Limitations
Below Croakey has compiled key takeaways from the reports, under the themes of: growing unease; mixed appetites; generational divides; trust – up and down; public service media; and key news topics.
Limitations of the surveys include that they capture people’s self-reported behaviour, which does not always reflect actual behaviour, and that sample sizes do not allow meaningful analysis of many minority groups.
The Australian researchers also note that online surveys will inevitably underrepresent the consumption habits of people who are not online (typically older, less affluent, regional residents, and with limited formal education).
As well, the Australian survey was conducted in English and does not represent our country’s linguistic diversity. (Previous research has called for media trust research to consider multicultural audiences).
A must-read
Before diving into the Digital News Report, please read and share this recent presentation by the publisher of The New York Times, A.G. Sulzberger, on implications of the AI juggernaut for our public square.
With the combined valuation of the six leading AI companies at $11 trillion – more than three times the GDP of France – he says it appears that less than half of one percent of that investment is going to compensate journalists, media companies and others who create the data that powers AI.
“The companies driving AI, already among the richest and most powerful in human history, are consolidating their outsize control over our data and our attention. At the same time, they are failing to embrace a core responsibility that comes with this power – to ensure the public has access to trustworthy news and information,” Sulzberger said.
“Their hijacking of the public square is made possible by the original sin that animates their AI products – a brazen theft of intellectual property that has occurred at an unprecedented scale. Tech giants strip-mine news websites without permission or compensation. They repackage these stolen goods as their own, siphoning off the audiences and revenue that otherwise would go to the news organisations that created this work. And this happens not just once during the training process, but countless times every single day.
“As a result, I fear we are careening toward a future with fewer and fewer journalists to do the expensive, difficult work of original reporting – going to places, talking to people, digging up information, covering important issues and events, providing context and analysis, investigating the powerful. A future where a crucial wellspring of a healthy society and a stable democracy – the truth, understanding and accountability provided by original journalism – continues to dry up.”
Sulzberger says his profession has been too quiet, too passive and too fragmented in the face of abuses by the companies leading the AI revolution, which he expects will fuel destructive trends. These include a continued surge in misinformation, propaganda, conspiracy theories, deepfakes and computer-generated slop, and a public that continues to be radicalised by algorithms that amplify fear, anger and division.
“All of this will worsen the alarming decline of social and civic health,” he says. “Evidence shows that when a local news organisation fails, people in a community start to trust each other less and hate each other more. They become more isolated and less tolerant. Civic engagement declines and public corruption rises.”
Concerns about the impact of AI upon news organisations were also raised during the panel discussion at the Australian report’s launch.
Australian Community Media’s Tony Kendall said 7.5 million AI bot scraping attempts were made on their sites last month, with 3.5 million of these being successful.
“We need change in copyright laws around our original content,” he said.
(Declaration from Croakey: AI bot scraping has also had a significant negative impact on our website and workflows).
And now for some key points from the Digital News Report.
Widespread unease
Global unease about the state of the world is a prominent theme.
“Our 2026 report finds news audiences around the world reacting with growing unease to successive episodes of political, economic, and technological turbulence,” write the authors of the global edition.
“Assumptions about the way the world works are being questioned as longstanding international alliances shift, the global trading system comes under strain, and the basic shape of the post-war order appears uncertain.
“At the same time, people are adapting to the rapid diffusion of artificial intelligence across many aspects of everyday life and, for many, the practical realities of climate change are increasingly being felt.”
The report says political instability, increasing social division, and pressure towards polarisation are inclining global audiences to take less interest in the news. At the same time, patterns of media use continue to change rapidly, reshaping how attention is distributed and who is able to capture it.
“Sandwiched between this political and social turbulence, journalists and news media organisations endeavour to report on dizzying events and to engage audiences despite a growing sense of dissatisfaction, and sometimes hostility, in many countries both from politicians and from some sections of the public,” says the global report.
“Our findings may invite questions about how far news organisations are either to blame for or in control of the key trends. It is perhaps more constructive to acknowledge the anxieties and concerns expressed by audiences and to focus on what journalism can do to help people interpret what is happening and its relevance to their daily lives.”
Mixed appetites for news
Since COVID, there has been a global trend towards diminishing interest in news, with interest falling by 13 percentage points (from 59% to just under 46%) since the height of the pandemic.
“These reductions of popular interest in news have democratic as well as commercial implications, making it harder to engage citizens in the political process as well as increasing the challenge of successfully monetising attention to the news, whether through advertising or by way of reader revenue,” say the global report’s authors.
In most countries intermediated third-party consumption platforms are more popular than the branded digital properties publishers themselves have built. Globally, 30 percent of people now say social media and video networks are their main source of news – up from 22 percent five years ago.
The proportion of people now only using social media and video networks for news has risen to 12 percent this year (versus six percent in 2020) – many of these individuals are in effect withdrawing from getting news in a variety of different ways and relying instead on seeing news occasionally when doing other things online.
Globally, more than half (52%) of respondents aged 18–24 now say that social media, video networks, and AI chatbots are their main way of getting news. Millennials and GenZ prefer to get their news from social media and video networks, while TV remains the main source of news for people aged 45 and above.
People who are using AI chatbots for news are a highly engaged, digitally sophisticated segment of the news audience.
At the global level, 56 percent of people aged 18–24 who did not read a newspaper in the last week report they have never read one regularly. The equivalent figure for television news is 21 percent.
Meanwhile, Google traffic from organic search to over 2,500 news sites was down by a third (33%) globally between November 2024 and November 2025. Looking ahead, publishers expect traffic from search engines to almost halve over the next three years.
These figures help explain why many news publishers have moved on from measuring audience reach as a key success metric, instead prioritising the depth of engagement with a smaller, more loyal audience, says the report.
The picture from the Australian report diverges from some global trends. After several years of decline, interest in news has increased, placing Australia well above the global average.
This recovery is driven largely by audiences who typically have low news interest, including women and young people. Interest in politics has also risen among people under 35, who now have higher levels of political interest than older cohorts for the first time.
Social media is now the second most used news source (56%, +9 percentage points) in Australia behind TV (57%). It has also become the main pathway (32%) to online news, overtaking direct access to news websites (31%) for the first time. This means that control over the visibility of news to audiences is increasingly mediated by digital platforms, and publishers are relying on the click-through rates.
Facebook remains the most widely used social media platform for news, despite Meta’s algorithmic strategy to deprioritise news. Older respondents have increased consumption of news on Facebook, while younger audiences increasingly prefer video-based platforms such as TikTok and Instagram.
Large proportions of Australians report having stopped using traditional news media over their lifetimes, such as newspapers and radio. Two in five (40%) Australians say they previously read newspapers regularly but no longer do so, far exceeding the proportion who have stopped using television (26%) or online news (15%).
Generational divides
Young people are unlikely to grow into the media habits of their parents’ generation, say the authors of the global report.
“The data show that – in the case of newspapers and radio – relatively few young people have been socialised into these consumption habits in the first place. The social reproduction of newspaper and radio news audiences may have broken down altogether.”
The Australian report identifies a widening generational divide in news habits, driven by increasing fragmentation in how, when, and where people access news.
For younger audiences, news consumption is unfixed and fluid, largely shaped by their heavy reliance on social media, noting also their low trust in the news they see on social media.
Many 18 to 24-year-olds have never used newspapers (60%), radio (53%) or TV (25%) as a news source. Almost half (48%, +12) of this age group use TikTok for news.
Australians are more loyal towards news brands than consumers in other countries, with around one-third saying they use the same news brands daily, with brand loyalty higher among older audiences, regional consumers, and those with lower education.
However, younger people are less attached to specific brands and more likely to use a wide range of sources. About half of people under 35 access more than seven news brands on a weekly basis. Young people are increasingly paying for news (41% of 25–34, +7).
“Overall, younger Australians are more flexible with their news consumption habits, and older generations are more fixed in their routines.”
Trust, up and down
The global report says that perhaps the best illustration of the unease caused by turbulent world affairs are this year’s data on trust in news. The proportion of respondents who say they trust news most of the time fell significantly this year.
The percentage of people globally saying they trust news overall dropped to 37 percent (having held steady at 40 percent for three years previously) – the lowest figure since the researchers started measuring trust in 2015.
Out of 48 markets in the report, 29 reported significant falls in trust in news this year. Several countries showed particularly marked drops: trust fell by five percentage points or more in 19 markets.
The report’s authors say it is difficult to disentangle declining trust in news organisations from broader scepticism about political and social institutions, but there has been a long-term international trend of falling trust in representative institutions such as governments and political parties.
Political instability, divisive elections, and a noisier and more fragmented information environment seem to be shared characteristics of markets where trust in news has fallen most.
Some reductions are almost certainly a consequence of direct attacks on news outlets and individual journalists, with a cumulative effect of undermining confidence in journalism overall, says the report.
Trust in news in the US is now the seventh lowest in the survey, reflecting its deepening political divides and sustained political pressure on the news domain, falling another five percentage points this year to 25 percent overall.
Just 15 percent of politically right-leaning Americans trust the news – very nearly the lowest reported figure for any left/centre/right political demographic in any country covered by the report (only 14 percent of people in Greece on the political left trust news overall).
On a global level, trust in news on social media and from AI chatbots stands at 22 percent and 20 percent respectively (trust in answers to news queries on search engines is significantly higher).
The report predicts that overall trust will continue falling as more people turn to social media and AI for news. By contrast, trust for many established news providers appears to be remaining steady.
Again, trends in Australia diverge from global patterns. Australians’ trust in news is unchanged in 2026 (43%), while trust in peoples’ own news sources has risen to 54 percent (+5 percentage points).
Strikingly, trust in news among people under 35 increased since 2024, who now have higher trust in news than older Australians – reversing a longstanding age gap.
Trust is highest in public service media news brands, with perceived quality of journalism one of the strongest predictors of trust. Belief in the positive social role of public service media is also strongly associated with higher trust.
Australians who believe news organisations are doing a good job reporting on major issues – such as climate change or cost of living – are much more likely to say they trust the news.
Misinformation
Globally, concerns about fake news are also up, by four percentage points to 62 percent on average, with jumps of more than five percentage points in 11 markets. Only in one market (Brazil) did misinformation concerns decrease.
Worries about fake news and misinformation remain highest in Nigeria and Kenya, followed by the UK, Australia, and Portugal.
In Norway, concerns about AI’s impact on young people’s news consumption peaked during the parliamentary election campaign and all the major political parties signed an agreement not to spread deepfakes and misinformation on social media.
Public service media
In 26 countries with significant public service media news providers, researchers found that people generally believe they have a positive impact (37% positive against 22% negative), but this is not the case everywhere.
Markets where sentiment is more mixed tend to be ones where trust in news generally is lower and polarising political dynamics are more evident.
In the US, Germany, Spain, the UK, and elsewhere there are also very large differences in attitudes about the social impact of public service media news between those on the left and the right of the political spectrum.
This is a topical issue in Australia, where One Nation leader Pauline Hanson told the National Press Club this week that she wants to axe SBS and cut back ABC.
Around half (49%) of Australians believe public service media have a positive effect on life in Australia – well above the global average – with younger adults more supportive (68%) than those aged 55–64 (34%) and 65+ (38%).
While older Australians’ use of public service media has declined since 2022, engagement among younger audiences has grown significantly from 43 percent in 2022 to 54 percent in 2026 among 18–24s.
News influencers
Around a quarter (27%) of respondents globally get some news from news-focused individual creators or influencers, and almost half (46%) get some news from creators of any type.
Respondents say creators are more entertaining, easier to understand, and more relatable than traditional news outlets. On average, people think creators are less trustworthy and less impartial compared to other attributes such as authenticity and relatability.
Most people who get news from creators are using them alongside traditional media – not instead of it. In fact, those who access creators consume more traditional media than the average respondent.
Averaged across all of markets in the global report, 13 percent of respondents say that most or all of their news needs are met by creators who focus on news and only three percent of people are relying solely on creators for their news.
In Australia, creators and influencers have an increasingly significant role in shaping how audiences discover, interpret, and engage with information.
Audiences who turn to these figures for news tend to value perspectives that either reflect or thoughtfully challenge their own views, rather than maintaining a neutral or undefined stance, says the University of Canberra report.
This preference does not necessarily indicate a desire for partisanship; rather, it reflects a demand for authenticity. Audiences are seeking news that breaks down complex stories, offers a clear viewpoint, and demonstrates a sense of purpose.
In Australia, almost three-quarters of people under 35 get news from influencers. Right-wing news influencer users are more likely to see them as knowledgeable (54%) and trustworthy (47%) than left-wing (35%; 24%).
The report says the influencer news market is highly fragmented. Consumers name hundreds of different individuals, journalists, and personalities, with low concentration even among top influencers.
“While this fragmentation may offer a diverse range of perspectives to audiences, it also produces a wide variation in quality and a lack of consistent industry standards, which may further erode trust in the wider news environment,” says the report.
Influencers are unlikely to replace mainstream news in the near future, says the report, “but audiences are signalling a clear desire for news that feels more accessible, engaging and relevant”.
Topics
Data in the global report reflect discontent with the way news media are covering many of the big, global stories.
Immigration in particular seems an issue which is hard, perhaps even impossible, for the news media to get right. Significantly more people think that the news media is doing a bad job rather than a good job of covering immigration.
Australians are evenly split on whether the news media are doing a good or bad job. Respondents are more likely to think that news organisations are doing a good job reporting on inflation and cost of living (36%) than other topics.
On immigration, only 23 percent say the news media are doing a good job. Perceptions of news quality vary sharply across demographics. Younger audiences, men, those with higher education, and heavy news consumers are consistently more positive.
The global report concludes on a hopeful note that “news organisations can play a vital role helping people make sense of seismic change in the world at large and in brokering and facilitating trust in societies and neighbourhoods where people may feel there is sometimes more which divides them than they have in common”.
However, while the report digs deep into consumption trends, it does not address in any detail the complex forces – commercial and political – that shape the supply of news in Australia and globally.
This type of analysis is vital for helping to inform responses to the crises in our news and information systems, which – as Sulzberger outlined – are only set to intensify.
See a playlist from report launch in Australia
See Croakey’s archive of articles on media and on misinformation
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