The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford has released its 2026 Digital News Report, the largest annual survey on global news consumption of its kind.
The report, presented at the DW Global Media Forum in Bonn, surveyed roughly 100,000 people across 48 countries, examining how audiences find, consume, and trust journalism today.
Jim Egan, the report’s main author, set a sobering tone early, warning that the “data this year is quite unsettling in many aspects.”
Egan framed the report’s purpose as grounding a noisy industry in verifiable reality, stating: “We do this as an exercise in trying to insert some facts and some comparative analysis across different markets into an industry and into an ecosystem that is full of opinion but does not always know what’s actually going on.”
One of the report’s headline findings is that social media networks and video platforms are now used more frequently as news sources than television or the dedicated websites and apps of news outlets.
Egan clarified that this is less about social media’s explosive growth and more about a collapse in traditional habits, noting: “What we’re seeing is a decline in the use of other platforms, such as television broadcast news, as well as going direct to a news organization’s website or its app.”
The shift is most pronounced among younger audiences, with more than one-third of all U.S. respondents under 25 saying they had never watched TV newscasts or regularly used news websites.
Egan captured the severity of this generational departure in stark terms: “They’re not only leaving, they’re not even starting.”
The report identifies a troubling contradiction at the heart of this migration, with Egan noting: “There’s an irony here that people are moving more and more to platforms that they trust less.”
Trust in news sourced from social media and video platforms remains the lowest of any news channel, even as those platforms continue to absorb more of the audience.
On a global scale, 34% of respondents use YouTube as a news source and 20% rely on TikTok, with figures varying sharply by country — in Kenya, 66% of consumers get their news via YouTube.
Some 75% of respondents claim to watch news videos on a weekly basis, yet traditional publishers with their own video content are failing to capitalize, with Egan observing that “audiences are not responding positively to on-site video.”
The report also pushes back against assumptions about young people’s attention spans, finding that roughly 20% of respondents regularly watch news videos exceeding 20 minutes in length.
Egan was direct in challenging the short-form stereotype: “It’s not as if younger people will only ever pay attention to a video of two minutes.”
Consumption is also shifting back into the living room, with a quarter of global respondents saying they watch news on platforms like YouTube via their television sets.
Artificial intelligence is emerging as a nascent news source, with the share of people globally using AI chatbots for news growing from 7% to 10% last year, which Egan described as “fast but not explosive growth.”
Egan acknowledged that while AI news trust is currently low, “that’s not going to last forever,” signaling that the industry should prepare for further disruption.
News influencers remain a niche phenomenon rather than a systemic replacement for established journalism, with only 10% of users saying such sources cover all of their news needs.
Trust in news broadly continued its downward trajectory, falling by at least three percentage points in 29 of the 48 countries surveyed, leaving only 37% of global respondents saying they mostly trust the news.
Egan found the speed of that decline alarming, stating bluntly: “Data shouldn’t move that much in a year.”
Despite the turbulence, Egan closed on a note of purpose, telling the audience in Bonn that “journalism still matters — in fact, in many ways it matters more than ever.”
The German component of the study was conducted by the Leibniz Institute for Media Research in Hamburg, and the Reuters Institute receives financial support from Google, among other backers.
