The annual Digital News Report is a must read for media leaders. Its findings routinely offer valuable insights that publishers can use to shape and inform their revenue strategies, content formats and investment in technology.

This year’s report, the 15th in the series, offers similar value, with findings based on a survey of almost 100,000 online news consumers across 48 markets around the world. 

Here is what media leaders need to know. 

1. Platform predominance hits a tipping point

For the first time, social media and video networks are now the most widely used sources for news consumption globally. Fifty-four percent of respondents used them for news, compared to 51% for owned news sites and apps and 52% for Broadcast TV News. Add AI chatbots and the combined third-party total reaches 56%.

That gap may sound modest, but longitudinal data demonstrates a clear trajectory. TV news (-13%), news websites and apps (-12%), have seen double digit declines in weekly usage since 2020.  Meanwhile, the proportion of people who say social media and video networks are their main source of news has risen from 22% to 30% in five years. 

And it’s not just young audiences prompting this change. It’s only among audiences 55-and-over where direct access to news sites has remained unchanged since 2021.

As Jim Egan, a Senior Research Associate at the Reuters Institute, and lead author for the study told me, this makes it all the more imperative that companies have a clear idea about the purpose of their off-platform strategies. Are you using these spaces to drive engagement and revenue, or are they primarily serving as a vehicle for brand maintenance and visibility?

These goals are not mutually exclusive, and they will vary by organization. Nevertheless, to punch through, the numbers suggest that many media outlets will need to sharpen their footprint on other properties. As Egan put it, “Social media strategies need to be more sophisticated now than simply, ‘you’ve got to fish where the fish are.’”

2. Your video efforts may be misplaced 

Integral to these off-platform strategies is understanding where, and when, audiences are consuming video content. Afterall, this is an area of major strategic focus and investment for many media companies, and it’s a market that is continuing to grow. 

Over three quarters (77%) of Reuters’ global sample consume online news video every week. Online news video viewing is ahead of broadcast TV in 45 of the 48 markets surveyed. The exceptions are Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands.

You could argue that this is good news for companies investing in video. However, audiences are typically not watching more news video on publishers’ own sites and apps. Consumption on owned properties is “going backwards,” the report authors note; down 5% over the past year. Instead, growth can be seen on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. YouTube is used for news by 34% of respondents globally; Instagram by 26%; TikTok by 20% (the fastest growing from a smaller base); and Facebook still leads the way at 43%. 

In our conversation, Egan flagged this finding as the most surprising in the study. Despite an explosion in online video consumption, fewer people are getting this content directly from news publishers. 

Egan noted that “33% of people said they were getting online news from a publisher website or app five years ago, and that’s gone down by 10 percentage points to 23%.” “I wasn’t expecting the numbers to go down over five years, given the increasing popularity of video as a format,” he added.

I asked Egan to speculate on why this was the case. One reason, he posited, is that audiences think of YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok as “where they go for video.” For many consumers, a news publisher’s app or website is a less instinctive place to go to for that experience. 

“Does the video experience work well enough? Is it sufficiently friction free on publisher websites, compared to the incredibly sophisticated and frictionless video experience on these platforms?” Egan asked. “Are we making it hard for people? Does a pre-roll put people off on publisher websites in a way that perhaps is a bit more tolerated on YouTube?” 

These are questions that audience, product and commercial teams, should be exploring more deeply. 

3. You need video strategies. Plural. 

It’s also worth noting that not all video platforms are the same. Audiences use them differently. And publishers should too. 

YouTube is not TikTok. Almost a quarter (23%) of YouTube news video viewers watch videos longer than 20 minutes. More than a third watch between 6 and 20 minutes. The appetite for long-form, substantive video content appears to be very real, and it lives primarily on YouTube. The ability to watch this content via a smart TV – as opposed to your phone – is also a factor in these habits. A quarter (27%) of the global sample already watch on-demand news via apps like YouTube on their smart TVs. 

Meanwhile, news consumption via TikTok and Instagram appears to be more accidental and less intentional. Over half of news users on these platforms say they mostly see news when they are there for other reasons.

This distinction between intent-driven and passive consumption should shape your audience strategies, and both content format and editorial expectations for each platform. 

4. Creators are not eating your lunch. Yet. 

Along with AI, the impact of the Creator Economy is one of the biggest shifts we are witnessing across the media landscape. Globally, 27% of respondents get some news from news-focused individual creators or influencers. Nearly half (46%) get news from creators of any type. Only 3% say all their news needs are met by news-focused creators. 

In many cases, Egan told Digital Content Next, that means that creator content is supplementing – rather than replacing – news consumption from more traditional brands. “The use of news creators is something that’s complementary and additive,” he observes. “It doesn’t seem to be coming at the expense of usage of traditional publishers.”

Survey participants rate creators as more entertaining, easier to understand, and more relatable than traditional outlets, although they rate them lower on trust and impartiality. What this means is that people turn to creators for accessibility and engagement, and to established brands for authority. 

“The way that creators have found a means of stimulating demand and getting people to be interested in news-related content is interesting, and probably encouraging,” Egan says. 

That’s both good and bad news for media companies, highlighting how news organizations are still seen as offering credibility, while creators lead the way in terms of connection. For publishers, the challenge is finding ways to deliver both.

News creators, “might not be eating our lunch,” Egan says, but “is our dinner safe? I don’t know.”

5. Trust levels remain low and are getting lower

As in previous years, the report reiterates the lack of trust many consumers have in news. Globally, this has dropped to 37%, the lowest level since 2015 when this metric began to be tracked. Trust fell in 29 of 48 markets, with drops of five points or more in 19 of them. 

For U.S. companies, the domestic numbers are starker. Only 25% of Americans now say they trust most news most of the time. That’s a five-point fall in a single year, with the U.S. seventh lowest of all markets surveyed. Among right-leaning Americans, that figure falls to 15%, nearly the lowest reported figure for any political demographic in any country in the study. 

The most trusted news brands in The States are local television outlets and regional or local newspapers, not the major national brands. Fox News and CBS News both lost 10 points of audience trust year-on-year, demonstrating declines on both sides of the political spectrum. 

These trends may have strategic implications for partnerships and how companies seek to position themselves editorially in an increasingly fragmented and polarized media environment.

The good news is that audiences still want journalism, and many of them want this to be impartial. Around half of survey respondent say they prefer news that does not take sides, outnumbering those who prefer opinionated news by more than two to one, and that figure has barely moved in six years. And, interestingly, Egan told me, “the proportion of people who say they prefer news that shares their point of view, that’s gone down over the last six, six years. That runs counter a little bit to the idea of where we all live in our echo chambers.”

6. Other key points

Markets to watch and learn from: Most DCN readers are North America-based. But the report’s coverage of 48 markets surfaces case studies, data and experiments that are worth tracking. 

Egan flagged India to as an underappreciated market where “the degrees of innovation and invention are quite fascinating.” Commercial creativity is happening against a backdrop of low levels of press freedom, serving as a reminder that constraints need not stifle creativity.

Alongside this, South Korea is a market to watch closely for AI adoption. AI chatbot use for news rose to 14%, double the number in 2025, and click-through rates from AI answers to original sources are the highest globally at 56%.  In contrast, Egan pointed out that usage of AI in this way in the UK sits at just 4%, and in the USA, it remained flat at 6% this year. That’s “despite the rapid diffusion and dissemination of AI into people’s lives,” he notes. 

Paying for news has flatlined, but there are ways forward: The proportion of people paying for online news has held steady at 17% across the 20 countries tracked over time. 

That plateau is not surprising given the wider structural trends outlined in the report. At the same time, the study also offers insights into why people pay. Unique content is fundamental. “The number one reason why people pay is because they want to get access to unique content they can’t get elsewhere,” Egan said, noting that this “is the bedrock of a reader revenue strategy.” 

But, alongside this, “there’s a lot of values-based or social motivations that people recognize and that resonate with individuals,” Egan observed. The report states that 46% give values-based reasons for supporting an outlet financially. 

“There’s a variety of different motivations that you can tap into,” Egan advises. Publishers who communicate their mission and values, as well as their distinctiveness, will be best served to attract – and retain – paid relationships with audiences in a world awash with content. 

Younger audiences continue to lean digital: More than half (56%) of 18–24 year-olds have never regularly read a newspaper. It’s possible they never will. 

A majority (52%) of respondents aged 18–24 say that social media, video networks, and AI chatbots are their main way of getting news. That’s 32% ahead of the next most popular source and a reminder that this audience is resolutely digital-first. 

The road ahead

The 2026 Digital News Report demonstrates the distribution challenge for publishers, and the difficulty of building direct relationships. 

As the report clearly demonstrates, the imperative for news publishers is to rise to the challenge of the structural drift toward platforms, video, and AI intermediaries. These trends only look set to continue. 

How fast you can move to meet your audience where they actually are, while giving them reasons to come back to your properties directly, remain the defining strategic questions facing the news media industry today.