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Dean Highlights The Reuters' 2025 Digital News Report So You Don't Have To
Consider this your invitation to get a drink, pop your feet up, and think about how the state of the world is conveyed to you rather than what the bad news of the week actually is.
(Is this escapism? Unrepentantly so. Also, a nerd out on the evolution of the media industry over the last few years. What else are you on the Motte for?)
This Monday the 2025 Digital News Report was published. This is a review of global media trends, such as how media consumption, habits, preferences, and audience composition have changed over the last years. It reflects on how various audiences consume and have been shaped by elements of the culture war, such as Musk's management of X, the rise of Tiktok, AI, and so on.
Given how much of the discourse here covers the coverage of these topics, this study seems salient. Especially since it is billed as the most comprehensive study of news consumption worldwide.
This is not an empty media boast. This probably is the most comprehensive, and global-spanning, media industry analysis I've read in some time, and while it's not without its blemishes. It's not without blemishes, but when the executive summary is 25 pages long (admittedly with many graphics), there's a lot to unpack. But since expecting anyone to read a 171 page report is a bit much, why not break it down a
bitlot?This post is going to be taking highlights, key points, and so on from the study executive summary. Much, but not all, will be quoted. I will make comments of my own where I feel most interested, but will try to keep my thoughts distinct from the article. Due to how it's formatted, it does not copy-paste neatly. Forgive the jank that slips through.
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Who is this by for whom and why should you believe a word of it?
This is Ivy League level academic research made with significant assistance by corporate media clearly hoping for actionable insights at a global level. Given the monetary incentives at stake, this is a case where commercial interests, including those well outside western progressive circles, are a mitigating influence to personal preferences.
The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism is a part of Oxford University in England. This is an academic-journalism nexus by, of, and for industry professionals. This level of academia has a lot of cross-pollination with the US, but this isn't 'merely' an advocacy section, but a professional interest institution.
The key sponsors and supporters of this report are identified on page 3 of the PDF. The 'main sponsor' is Google News Initiative, but the 'supported by' includes a whose-who of major western media companies. Not just newspaper companies like Reuters either, but groups like Youtube, BBC, Korea Press Foundation, Ofcom, CodeAfrica, and other media actors. This is Media as a Business, not media as a political faction, and the target audiences are global, not American-European specifically.
This sponsorship is key for understanding the article's focus on consumer demographics, preference changes, and so on. This is a report on 'how people consume digital news' paid by the types of groups that provide digital media. When it addresses topics of 'people are tuning out,' this is not (primarily) in the sense of an ideological 'people are ignoring us,' but in the context of 'consumers are not consuming your product for these reasons.'
This corporate motive is a basis to give credence to the data-driven observations here. This is a product paid for with money to generate more money, and so accuracy is an interest more than ideological performance. When the study talks about media market trends, it's for the sake of people who want a more accurate understanding of the media market.
That said... (Bias Warning)
Yes, there is bias, of a predictable pro-media-establishment sort. Oxford is still a prestige university, and the Reuters Institute being a professional interest institution is still both for, by, and once again for journalists. Unsurprisingly, they have a good impression of themselves, and bad impression of others who doubt their conduct or character. The dislike of Trump is palpable in the way that only 'we will use studiously neutral language except for our word choice framing unfavored actors' can be, and gets a bit more blatant in country-by-country breakdowns deep in.
That said- it's still worth reading. This is what it looks like when people try to mitigate their biases and take an objective look at the situation. Whatever the authors of a specific section may feel people should feel about themselves, they are not adverse to directly recognizing things like low reputational trust.
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The Methodology
This is a 'good enough to be useful' YouGov online questionnaire between January and February 2025, not a 'gold standard' method. Page 6 has the disclaimers and caveats for how strongly, or not strongly, to take certain elements. Statistics given should be understood to be ballpark estimates.
• Samples were assembled using nationally representative quotas for age, gender and region in every market. Education quotas were also applied in all markets except Kenya, Nigeria, Morocco, Peru, and Thailand. We also applied political quotas based on vote choice in the most recent national election in around a third of our markets including the United States, Australia, and much of Western Europe. The data in all markets were weighted to targets based on census/industry accepted data.
Note that 2024 was a year of many major elections in the US and Europe. As a result, this (should) reflect a fair deal of European political distribution.
• Data from India, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa are representative of younger English-speakers and not the national population, because it is not possible to reach other groups in a representative way using an online survey. The survey was fielded mostly in English in these markets,1 and restricted to ages 18 to 50 in Kenya and Nigeria. Findings should not be taken to be nationally representative in these countries.
The survey was not done in English in most markets, however, giving substantial insight potential.
• More generally, online samples will tend to under-represent the news consumption habits of people who are older and less affluent, meaning online use is typically over-represented and traditional offline use under-represented. In this sense, it is better to think of results as representative of the online population.
This is the key caveat. This is not a full study of all media consumers, but specifically online media consumers, i.e. the generation of today and the trends to expect to grow tomorrow as old people die and younger people replace them.
• The use of a non-probability sampling approach means that it is not possible to compute a conventional ‘margin of error’ for individual data points. However, differences of +/- 2 percentage points (pp) or less are very unlikely to be statistically significant and should be interpreted with a very high degree of caution. We typically do not regard differences of +/- 2pp as meaningful, and as a general rule we do not refer to them in the text. The same applies to small changes over time.
Don't put too much faith on the exact numbers, but do value the magnitude and general direction.
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Opening Narrative
This executive summary opens with this narrative, before many sub-sections. This section is quoted in full.
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Key Findings
This section is provided in full. Following sections will be selective extracts.
• Engagement with traditional media sources such as TV, print, and news websites continues to fall, while dependence on social media, video platforms, and online aggregators grows. This is particularly the case in the United States where polling overlapped with the first few weeks of the new Trump administration. Social media news use was sharply up (+6pp) but there was no ‘Trump bump’ for traditional sources.
One of the (not explicit) trends in the survey is that alternative-media news consumption increases as the engagement, and trust, in traditional media falls. There is more explicit recognitition of alternative media environments later.
• Personalities and influencers are, in some countries, playing a significant role in shaping public debates. One-fifth (22%) of our United States sample says they came across news or commentary from popular podcaster Joe Rogan in the week after the inauguration, including a disproportionate number of young men. In France, young news creator Hugo Travers (HugoDécrypte) reaches 22% of under-35s with content distributed mainly via YouTube and TikTok. **Young influencers also play a significant role in many Asian countries, including Thailand. **
One of the (non-explicit) parallels/trends in this study is that the US media market is diverging in style from Europe, and more towards Asia. This correlates with relative trust in establishment media and political polarization, which is characterized here as having been higher in Asia than in Europe for some time.
• News use across online platforms continues to fragment, with six online networks now reaching more than 10% weekly with news content, compared with just two a decade ago. Around a third of our global sample use Facebook (36%) and YouTube (30%) for news each week. Instagram (19%) and WhatsApp (19%) are used by around a fifth, while TikTok (16%) remains ahead of X at 12%.
Remember the selection bias for the yougov poll, but later points indicate that the increase in social media news-sourcing being done by younger demographics, i.e. the long-term future.
• Data show that usage of X for news is stable or increasing across many markets, with the biggest uplift in the United States (+8pp), Australia (+6pp), and Poland (+6pp). Since Elon Musk took over the network in 2023 many more right-leaning people, notably young men, have flocked to the network, while some progressive audiences have left or are using it less frequently. Rival networks like Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon are making little impact globally, with reach of 2% or less for news.
This surprised me a bit since there was a dedicated effort to undercut / subvert X due to Musk. Later data indicates this is more because more right-leaning people joined than left-leaning people left, which isn't surprising, but the failure of the rivals to scale upwards is notable as a long-term influence vector.
• Changing platform strategies mean that video continues to grow in importance as a source of news. Across all markets the proportion consuming social video has grown from 52% in 2020 to 65% in 2025 and any video from 67% to 75%. In the Philippines, Thailand, Kenya, and India more people now say they prefer to watch the news rather than read it, further encouraging the shift to personality-led news creators.
This is an interesting trend / potential causal loop where low trust in establishment media feeds social media sources, social media sources leading to more trusted personalities, and those personality-led creators being more successful with video, not just audio or text, as the way to establish their personality for the personal relationship trust.
• Our survey also shows the importance of news podcasting in reaching younger, better-educated audiences. The United States has among the highest proportion (15%) accessing one or more podcasts in the last week, with many of these now filmed and distributed via video platforms such as YouTube and TikTok. By contrast, many northern European podcast markets remain dominated by public broadcasters or big legacy media companies and have been slower to adopt video versions.
Video-podcasts are rising / eclipsing purely audio-podcasting, which may factor in the personal-relationship-trust alternative model raised above.
• TikTok is the fastest growing social and video network, adding a further 4pp across markets for news and reaching 49% of our online sample in Thailand (+10pp) and 40% in Malaysia (+9pp). But at the same time people in those markets see the network as one of the biggest threats when it comes to false or misleading information, along with Facebook.
Growth of tiktok is not surprising. Credibility might be noteworthy later. One of the information-conflict concerns over Tiktok is that Chinese control over the alorithm shapes what people will see, and thus believe. I've my doubts on the efficacy of that level of influence, and this point on platform-prevalence also corresponding with platform-skepticism suggest that the personality-led model will matter more, which mitigates/reduces the impact of algorithmic bias efforts.
• Overall, over half our sample (58%) say they remain concerned about their ability to tell what is true from what is false when it comes to news online, a similar proportion to last year. Concern is highest in Africa (73%) and the United States (73%), with lowest levels in Western Europe (46%).
Note that Western Europe is a major outlier in the media-skeptic trends, but even here it is a nearly 50-50 concern split. This will be relevant two items down.
• When it comes to underlying sources of false or misleading information, online influencers and personalities are seen as the biggest threat worldwide (47%), along with national politicians (47%). Concern about influencers is highest in African countries such as Nigeria (58%) and Kenya (59%), while politicians are considered the biggest threat in the United States (57%), Spain (57%), and much of Eastern Europe.
I'll just note with some humor that the 'influencers' are raised as the biggest threat, despite the same % as 'national politicians.' This is what I meant earlier about elements of bias seeping in.
• Despite this, the public is divided over whether social media companies should be removing more or less content that may be false or harmful, but not illegal. Respondents in the UK and Germany are most likely to say too little is being removed, while those in the United States are split, with those on the right believing far too much is already taken down and those on the left saying the opposite.
When combined with the online truthiness statistic above, this may suggest that efforts on the European level for media fact checking are hinged on (decreasing) higher-trust / older demographic of the political-establishment-center who feels things might yet still be saved.
If those European efforts don't become policy sooner than later, then as political polarization / political-right normalization continues, European markets may hit the same sort of political tipping point where political pluralities view 'confidence-boosting fact checking' as 'politically motivated censorship against them,' facilitating the trust spiral. Thus, a limited political window of opportunity before establishment fatigue leads to the current establishments being able to implement these policies to (hopeful) success.
• We find AI chatbots and interfaces emerging as a source of news as search engines and other platforms integrate real-time news. The numbers are still relatively small overall (7% use for news each week) but much higher with under-25s (15%).
There's an unsurprising theme of the younger generation being both the most online, the most attuned to social media, and the most comfortable with AI products.
• With many publishers looking to use AI to better personalise news content, we find mixed views from audiences, some of whom worry about missing out on important stories. At the same time there is some enthusiasm for making the news more accessible or relevant, including summarisation (27%), translating stories into different languages (24%), better story recommendations (21%), and using chatbots to ask questions about news (18%).
• More generally, however, audiences in most countries remain sceptical about the use of AI in the news and are more comfortable with use cases where humans remain in the loop. Across countries they expect that AI will make the news cheaper to make (+29 net difference) and more-up-to-date (+16) but less transparent (-8), less accurate (-8), and less trustworthy (-18).
• These data may be of some comfort to news organisations hoping that AI might increase the value of human-generated news. To that end we find that trusted news brands, including public service news brands in many countries, are still the most frequently named place people say they go when they want to check whether something is true or false online, along with official (government) sources. This is true across age groups, though younger people are proportionately more likely than older groups to use social media to check information as well as AI chatbots.
Trusted News Brands is relevant in part because the personality-driven social media network is also a 'trust' relationship. The key point I'd take away / spread is that when people don't feel they can trust traditional media, they are increasingly comfortable / able to defect to the non-traditional media based on trust in a personality, since that's the next-best proximity.
This (loosely) aligns with a regular critique I've made regarding public legitimacy of officials during COVID, when institutional lying lost public trust. Trust / credibility is a resource that's not easily regained.
• One more relatively positive sign is that overall trust in the news (40%) has remained stable for the third year in a row, even if it is still four points lower overall than it was at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic.
Remember that this study is by journalist professionals, for journalist professionals. Also remember the warning of bias earlier. 'We should consider it a good sign only 60% do not overall trust in our profession, only one-in-twenty less than during Covid' is damning with faint praise.
• As publishers look to diversify revenue streams, they are continuing to struggle to grow their digital subscription businesses. The proportion paying for any online news remains stable at 18% across a basket of 20 richer countries – with the majority still happy with free offerings. Norway (42%) and Sweden (31%) have the highest proportion paying, while a fifth (20%) pay in the United States. By contrast, 7% pay for online news in Greece and Serbia and just 6% in Croatia
This is business-actionable advice. Don't be surprised if some media corporation takes this as evidence that people need to be less happy with free offerings.
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The preceeding was just the first two pages of the Executive Summary, and this post is over 2/5ths of the word count. The rest of the EXSUM is section-by-section summaries, often elaborating on the key finding paragraphs posted above , so I will quote the major sections, and the most interesting bits by exception.
Please feel free to read the full thing. The executive summary is 25 pages, but it's one-paragraph bits like the above, and not terribly dense.
TRADITIONAL NEWS MEDIA LOSING INFLUENCE – UNITED STATES IN THE SPOTLIGHT
In culture-war terms, the red tribe seems to have succeeded in creating its alternative media ecosystem to survive (and thrive) in, and people are increasingly making the jump. X is not-quite-directly credited that elsewhere.
A non-culture-war explanation for part of the decline, however, is less about tribal politics, and more about technology and business models. As the internet streaming services have undercut cable TV, and internet aggregators undercut papers, traditional media consumption would be declining regardless of politics, just by medium-shift.
Already hit the drum that, in the absence of trusted institutions, people will turn to trusted individuals.
A humorous culture swing at our (western) European members here is that the reason they have higher trust in their media institutions because they have more forgettable media influencers to steal them away.
PLATFORM RESETS AND THEIR IMPACT ON NEWS MEDIA
ELON MUSK’S X AUDIENCE SHIFTS RIGHTWARDS - NO LOSS OF OVERALL REACH
The italicized not was in the original, and is one of the very rare cases it was used. This is about as much of a professional shock as the authors can convey.
This may also shape media company / advertiser perceptions of dealing with X. Part of the X-odus was the (alleged) advertiser boycott. Industry data suggesting the X-audience has not dropped, but in some categories expanded to underserved markets, would support media-actor changes over time.
There is a good graphic in the document (pg 15) which shows X dropping about 5% from 20% to 15% by politically-left respondents after Musk's takeover and rebrand, before jumping to 24% after Trump's election. Over the same general time period, right-respondents when from 9% to 26% to using Twitter for news.
This- combined with the failure of the left-social-sphere like Bluesky- makes X an uncontested (but now bipartisan) public forum.
RISE OF VIDEO NETWORKS INCREASES PRESSURE ON NEWS MEDIA
The exception of TikTok is one of those actionable things for the corporate media funders/audience. This is an incentive to try and make deals with TikTok for greater access, and/or a basis to try and lawfare TikTok out of their domestic media markets.
UNDERLYING PREFERENCES ARE SHIFTING TOO
In the correlations with easier, the countries with higher establishment media trust, and the higher willingness to support media truth-corrections, are also the countries where most people still prefer to read rather than hear (or watch) their online news.
The change of audience intake is liable to accelerate even in Europe, as media corporations (the study founders) are in a feedback loop of providing more video to meet demands for video, which are accelerating demands for video.
This suggests a... not imminently, but already changing media relationship that will- through the European sharing of US online service providers like Google- bring Europe towards the global norm of personality-media (the winners of video-format), and its associations with lower trust in traditional institutions. Which feeds into the 'window of opportunity' point for any establishment efforts at information-regulation.
THE CHANGING SHAPE AND GROWING INFLUENCE OF NEWS PODCASTING
I wonder how much of the US podcast culture is because of how it aligns with American driving culture, where a podcast is something you can do on the commute to work.
ONLINE MISINFORMATION AND NEWS LITERACY
This is one of the sections where the professional/personal biases of the presenters can probably be most easily inferred.
Buried further down...
I doubt the term 'liberal agenda' was chosen entirely by accident after 'powerful agenda.' (Particularly since 'progressive' barely shows in the study- primarily in the Twitter/X exodus after Musk, and then a few times in the later country studies.)
NEWS LITERACY MAKES LESS DIFFERENCE THAN YOU MIGHT THINK
This one is amusing.
Remember- the age demographic most likely to eschew traditional media for personality-driven social media is also the demographic more likely too have received literacy training.
So- how do you define success?
There is an interesting potential future implication this might have when it comes to corporate lobbying for media regulation / truthiness. Remember that this study was founded by, among others, Google and Youtube. They don't like necessarily that literacy trainign people are concerned a bit more about social and video networks... but young people are also predominantly on those networks, and more importantly, so are the trusted personality-centric mediators.
As a result, increasing concerns about misinformation- both of social media but also traditional media- is more likely to drive audiences to the personalities on the networks that certain corporate strategies can aim to own the profit-streams of.
HOW AUDIENCES VIEW THE ISSUE OF CONTENT MODERATION IN SOCIAL MEDIA
This is your reminder that Oxford University, the university overseeing this research, is based in the UK.
The study does not address why non-westerners stand where they do on censorship responsibilities for the public good.
I've mentioned before the prospect of a 'window of opportunity' for European center-left establishments to enforce moderation/censorship policies on media. There are definitely efforts that have been done in the past / are underway in thhe present, but this 'limited opportunity' is the stability/longevity of these dominant coalitions to do so before the ongoing political trends of European establishment delegitimization, the rise of the right, and the demographic turnover change many of the base conditions.
I won't make a position of what will or will not succeed in the next five years, especially with Donald Trump and US (social) media companies as a foil for European nativist efforts, but I wouldn't be surprised if moderation propositions run into consistently increased resistance beyond five years from now.
TRUST IN THE NEWS
Remember from earlier, that the 'stable ever since' was '4 points lower than during covid.'
WHAT THE MEDIA COULD DO TO INCREASE TRUST
This is the last section I'll cover due to post size, but I'll quote it in full due to salience.
All in all, a good and refreshing bit of frankness of some of the challenges, and things that are in the study's audience (media corporations and journalists) to take away.
Which, of course, is why this section ends with this-
I hear a 'but the bad news' coming on...
Well, they can't annoy the wrong people with truth telling, or let hostile groups use transparency to take things out of context. Better to annoy the right people, and let no one else benefit from the transparency when hostile groups point and accuse.
Le sigh.
This break down ends here. There are ten more pages of the EXSUM, but this is already at 45k words and I doubt I'd get through the rest... and its already 45k words. Plus, what remains transitions more into the clearly business-model-focused stuff, albeit a lot of it dealing with AI.
Instead of carrying on, I'll leave with an endorsement. Despite how I feel about that end section, there is a lot of good data to go over here, and more topics of interest. Chances are if you've read this far, you'd be willing to do so further if any of the topics catch your eye. Do so! Here's the link to the study one last time, and I'll end on the remaining sections.
I'd like this to be true but it seems very trivially not. Not in the sense that most people wouldn't say this, I don't doubt that at all, but they are either lying or have no self-knowledge. If people wanted depth they would be deserting popular 'mainstream' news for the most high-brow alternatives, not the worst social media slop. If they wanted to they could even just go and pick up a copy of the Economist and become part of the most well-informed 5% of the public on world news, but they don't.
These people do not generally trust that the Economist is where well-informed people are. That's what widespread loss of faith in institutions looks like.
The Economist isn't particularly highbrow either. Kind of mid-wit for just recycling consensus takes with branding. Very much in the middle of the low-mid-high IQ meme.
Assuming that the advertisers know what they are doing, the Economist readership is about as highbrow as you can get. If you ignore the filler (i.e. the articles) and focus on the paid-for content (i.e. the ads) there are far more yachts, Rolexes etc. in the Economist than in Tatler.
No, The Economist’s readership has a substantial number of students and juniors, plus interested normal people who like to imagine themselves as the kind of person who reads it, many of whom don’t have a lot of money. It’s largely the magazine for the back office. FT Weekend’s readership is likely wealthier, because it’s mainly older print readers of the paper who have some money (students and juniors on the app aren’t going to care to read it).
Tatler’s readership is bifurcated between that sub-group of rich Arabs and Asians (they have a big audience in Hong Kong, Singapore and the Gulf) who enjoy the Anglo aesthetic, are often involved with polo, ride, have country houses in England, that sort of thing, and the residual English upper and upper-middle classes, some of whom have money and some of whom don’t. That niche means Tatler’s ads are more targeted, although there is still plenty of Patek and Lori Piana. Bien pensant PMCs might read that awful Air Mail or even worse Monocle, which also have all the Rolex and Porsche ads.
I mostly think of the Economist as 'that magazine which is read by my friends who think that running a country would be easy if you could make everyone take an economics course'. It's Oxford's PPE degree between glossy covers - that particular arrogance engendered by a very wide purview and not-quite-deep-enough subject knowledge.
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