The 2026 Digital News Report, recently published by the Reuters Institute in collaboration with the University of Oxford, highlights the volatile landscape observed in the past year’s rapidly evolving media ecosystem. News consumption is increasingly characterised by “platformisation,” with social media and video networks becoming the dominant mode of accessing news globally for the first time in history. At the same time, the growing integration of AI into the production and consumption of news poses new challenges for journalists and consumers. These trends carry broad implications for trust in media, policymaking, and public service media and continue to evolve with social, political, economic, and technological developments underway globally.
Below are highlights from the 2026 Report’s findings, using data from 48 countries.
Trust in News
Trust in news is down in 29 of 48 markets studied, hitting a new low in 2026 since tracking began in 2015. In Europe, trust fell across most of the continent, most sharply in Ireland (−9pp), while Nordic countries and Germany held steady, and Serbia (19%), Croatia (22%), and Greece (24%) remain the continent’s least-trusted news environments.
The report notes that declining trust in news is difficult to decouple from a broader erosion of trust in the government, driven by political instability, divisive elections, and the rise of far-right and populist movements. This erosion of trust can also be directly tied to the surge in popularity of social media, video networks, and AI chatbots as news sources—all of which audiences trust significantly less than traditional media. The report also accounts for concerns about fake news, which are up by 4pp to 62% on average, in shaping this distrust.
Interest in news has also fallen globally by an average of 13pp across markets surveyed, and most drastically in Europe from 2021 to 2026 at -9pp. As last year’s report documented, news avoidance and disinterest is tied to the “overload” of emotion that arises from intense negative or sensational coverage, or general pessimism and anxiety surrounding a nation’s political situation. This decline in trust and interest raises serious implications for the livelihoods of journalists and journalism broadly: as audiences disengage, the public’s capacity to stay informed and participate meaningfully in democratic life.
Platformisation
Echoing the trends of the past several years, social media continues to lie at the center of global media consumption habits, with 54% of people globally using social media and video networks for news. Feeds, short-form video content, and platforms like WhatsApp, TikTok, and YouTube are increasingly displacing traditional outlets as the primary venue for news and commentary. The report emphasizes that these new—increasingly short-form—formats are not replacing traditional journalism, but are reshaping consumption patterns to prize efficiency and shareability. Western Europe remains one of the few regions where traditional news websites are still the dominant mode of consumption.
Large tech companies continue to serve as the dominant influencers of the visibility of content: Meta’s 2025 decision to boost news content on Facebook drove a rare rebound in its news usage, a reminder that publisher traffic is ultimately hostage to platform policy decisions. This concentration of power in third-party platforms poses a direct threat to the viability of independent journalism, as Google’s rollout of AI-generated search summaries has driven a 33% drop in organic search traffic to news sites globally, with publishers projecting that figure to nearly halve within three years.
Still, there is overall little change in the proportion of respondents who choose to pay for news, which is at 10-20% in most markets.
News Creators
The mounting popularity of social media as a medium for news has been accompanied by a rise of news creators and influencers on these platforms: 27% of consumers get their news from influencers specifically, and that number increases to 45% when considering creators who do not specialize in news or commentary but sometimes discuss current events.
At the same time, the report highlighted that news influencers should not necessarily be viewed as a threat to traditional media. Although this trend remains limited in Europe, in countries where traditional journalism faces serious threats and restrictions—such as Hungary and Serbia—news content creators can play a crucial role as independent voices. News creators are also generally used as a complement to traditional news, the report explained, with 87% of people responding that none or only some of their needs met by creators and go to other sources
Public Service Media
Public Service Media (PSM) remains an institution that people generally view positively, with an average of 37% of respondents saying that public service news has either a ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ positive effect on life in their country, 35% take a mixed view and 22% think it has a negative effect. This continued faith in PSM is a testament to the imperative for safeguarding journalism as a public good, especially amid the rise of far-right and populist movements that seek to defund and discredit public broadcasters.
Notably, however, in five markets—Italy, Croatia, France, Slovakia, and Serbia—people overall believe that public service news has a net negative impact on life in their country. The report accounts for this discrepancy by explaining that negative attitudes towards PSM tend to cluster within countries where the institution itself is under attack, facing organisational upheaval, funding cuts, and external pressure from politicians or media conglomerates. Data also show a strong association between overall trust in news and views about the social impact of PSM on society.
“The findings on public service media perhaps provide the clearest conclusion in this year’s Digital News Report and point us towards where solutions should be found,” said EFJ President Maja Sever. “Public service media can fulfil this mission only if they are genuinely independent. Where they become politically captured…public service media cease to serve the public. This is what must change. Strengthening public service media means protecting their independence so that they can fulfil the role for which they were created: to be the voice of the public, a home for independent and accountable journalism, and an essential pillar of democracy.”
AI Chatbots
While AI chatbot use for news grew from 7% to 10% from 2025 to 2026, its use remains notably low in Europe and the USA compared to global averages. This is partially explained by Europe’s relatively low trust in AI: whereas trust in answers from AI chatbots is 20% globally, relative to trust in news overall at 37%, in the UK the corresponding figure is 6%, the lowest of any market.
Moreover, among respondents who reported using AI chatbots as their primary news source, 42% of them said they often or always click through links and verify the credibility of the news they were receiving.
In many ways, the 2026 report documents a serious erosion: legacy news media is declining in popularity, trust continues to fall as political actors and media corporations exert undemocratic control over content, and the deployment of AI chatbots is rapidly evolving to threaten the livelihoods of journalists.
However, the onus for repairing this crisis of trust “cannot rest solely with journalists,” said Maja Sever. “Equal responsibility lies with those who increasingly control access to information: the major technology platforms, social media companies and AI systems that determine what information people see, what they do not see and how news reaches audiences. Without greater accountability from these actors, rebuilding trust in both journalism and the wider information ecosystem will remain an impossible task.”
Source: EFJ
