For the first time, social media overtakes TV as Americans’ top news source
For years, social media and video apps weren’t quite able to overtake good old television as Americans’ most-used source for news. That’s finally changed, according to Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) in its 2025 Digital News Report, out Monday.
RISJ has released a digital news report every year since 2012. This year it surveyed nearly 100,000 people in 48 countries (new this year: Serbia) about their news consumption, via a YouGov survey. Below, Nieman Lab’s team breaks out a few of the main findings. And stay tuned because we’ll be running two more pieces by RISJ researchers next week — one on local news, and one on AI and personalization.
Traditional news sources are losing influence in the United States
For the first time, social media has displaced television as the top way Americans get news. “The proportion accessing news via social media and video networks in the United States (54%) is sharply up,” the report’s authors write, “overtaking both TV news (50%) and news websites/apps (48%) for the first time.”
And this isn’t just a story about big numbers:
While the use of notifications has grown over the past decade, many consumers say they’re overwhelmed. Both Apple and Google have also started building in tools to reduce and summarize notifications. The vast majority of respondents (79%) said they didn’t get any news alerts at all during the average week.Using data from Project Push, which I wrote about last month, the authors also found large geographic differences in how alerts are used. Users in the Global South, particularly Kenya and India, receive far more notifications than users elsewhere:
— Neel Dhanesha
The great AI split
This year’s report confirms that audience attitudes toward AI vary greatly by region, including a clear gap between European and Asian audiences. The report ranks Croatia, Finland, Denmark, and Belgium as the most skeptical countries toward stories “produced mostly by AI with some human oversight.” While 44% of Indian readers and 38% of Thai readers said they were comfortable with such stories, only 11% of readers in the U.K. agreed.
The report attributes this gulf, in part, to higher adoption rates among both publishers and consumers in countries like India. Indian newspapers have launched partially automated YouTube channels, some with AI avatar presenters. Nearly a fifth of Indian readers said they use chatbots like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini (including AI Overviews) weekly to access news. In the U.K., that number was only 3%.
In all, 4% of respondents across the markets studied use ChatGPT to access news, with lower rates for competing products. News aggregator apps, with their mix of algorithmic and manual curation to personalize news, are more widely used. In Japan, companies like SmartNews have been dominant for over a decade. Now, some of these same apps are folding generative AI into their products, mostly to send mobile push notifications.
These notifications have become a critical way of delivering breaking news, particularly in mobile-majority, Android-first markets in South Asia, Latin America, and Africa. In Kenya, 38% of the market uses Opera News, an app run by the second-most popular web browser in the country. Opera News has a 14% weekly share in South Africa.
In the U.S., to a lesser degree, Newsbreak has been able to court users with its own form of AI personalization, sometimes filling voids left by shuttered local news outlets. A subsidiary of the Chinese news aggregator Yidian Zixun, the app came under fire last year for pushing out fabricated crime stories generated by AI. Still, Newsbreak is currently reaching 9% of the weekly U.S. market. Earlier this year, Apple News rolled out and then withdrew similar AI-generated news alerts, due to high-profile errors and hallucinations. While AI-generated notifications may streamline production, incidents like these show they also risk alienating audiences, particularly in more skeptical markets.
— Andrew Deck
Good morning, iPhone
The hold our phones have on us is only deepening, the report notes.
In the U.S., 39% say their smartphone is the first way they come across news in the morning. Among Americans under 35, that proportion rises to 57%. The proportions who first see news via their phones are similar in the United Kingdom (37%), South Africa (38%), and Denmark (35%).
— Sarah Scire
Podcasts are popular, and the U.S. is in a bubble of its own
For the first time, the report’s researchers asked participants about their weekly consumption of news podcasts. They found that 9% of people around the world listen to news podcasts in a given week, although that number varies significantly by region, from just 3% in Japan to 15% in the United States.
The popularity of podcasts in the U.S. reflects the amount of investment publishers, producers, and advertisers have put into podcasts: “Our data suggest that in the U.S. a similar proportion now consume news podcasts each week as read a printed newspaper or magazine (14%) or listen to news and current affairs on the radio (13%),” the authors write.
The types of podcasts people listen to, and how they listen to them, also vary by geography. In the U.S., the authors find a split between “analysis-led shows from legacy brands” like The New York Times’ The Daily and NPR’s Up First and “personality-led podcasts that mostly deal in commentary or point of view.” Many of those personality-led podcasts are right-leaning (many people named The Joe Rogan Experience as their podcast of choice), though a few left-leaning podcasts like MeidasTouch and Pod Save America also broke through.
YouTube has become the biggest podcast distribution platform in the U.S., reflecting a general shift toward video-first podcasts, though that doesn’t necessarily mean publishers should all pivot to video podcasts: The rise of YouTube-first podcasts, the authors write, might be a particularly American phenomenon driven largely by hosts with big personalities. Outside the U.S., Spotify and public media apps like BBC Sounds in the U.K. and ARD Audiothek in Germany are the most popular audio platforms, and legacy media brands — especially public media companies — tend to dominate the podcast market.
Audiences in non-American markets, the authors write, “put much more emphasis on impartial deep analysis (getting information) than opinionated hosts. The appeal of hosts is more evident in the U.S., where the market is characterized more strongly by partisan personalities, but this doesn’t necessarily translate into a desire to watch.”
Podcast subscriptions have also been on the rise. On average, while less than a fifth (18%) of respondents said they had paid for online news of any kind in the last year, 42% of news podcast listeners across 20 countries said they’d be willing to pay a “reasonable price” for podcasts they like.
— Neel Dhanesha
The report includes sections on the news environments in each of the 48 countries surveyed. Hanaa’ Tameez and Sophie Culpepper pulled out some of the most interesting tidbits.
Dispatches from Europe
Across the 25 European countries included in the Digital News Report’s market-specific analyses, a few superlatives:
- Highest (European) trust levels: Finland — 67% of Finns trust “most news most of the time.”
- Highest proportion willing to pay for news: A whopping 42% of Norwegian news users pay for online news, the highest across all 48 markets studied.
- Highest level of news avoidance: This ominous title belongs to Bulgaria, at 63%. Reuters suggests the country’s “highly volatile political environment” contributes to this (and to declining trust in news).
- Highest (European) users of social media for news: Serbia, with 67% of Serbians using social media for news.
- Lowest trust levels: A tie between Greece and Hungary, at 22%. This is the lowest level of all 48 markets included in the report. For Greece, “Trust is low across all groups, but even lower among younger and left-wing respondents.”
Scandinavia embraces AI
Unlike other countries, where news organizations are individually seeking deals with tech and AI platforms, Danish publishers are continuing their collective efforts to combat big tech’s unsanctioned use of news organizations’ copyrighted content and data archives for AI-model training purposes. After deadlocked talks with Meta, Google, and Open AI, a state mandated conciliation procedure is being opened with these platforms, possibly as a precursor to entering legal proceedings.Most Finnish newsrooms now use AI technologies. In addition to transcribing interview recordings, creating headlines, proofreading, and making summaries, several more advanced tools for reporters have also been developed. The evening tabloid paper, Iltalehti, uses a tool that analyses the emotional response a headline may produce in readers. Additionally, it assesses whether the piece is provocative, sad, analytical, breaking news, empathetic, questioning, useful, entertaining, or constructive. Sanoma, for its part, has developed a tool that monitors sources, such as municipal decision-making documents, to find potentially newsworthy items for their journalists.The Swedish News Media Association’s innovation of the year award went to the integration-oriented news podcast Daily Arabic, developed by Aftonbladet and Alkompis, targeted at the Arabic-speaking community in Sweden. Aftonbladet selects content from its podcasts and uses AI for translation to Arabic, which is then checked by Alkompis staff. In addition, Svenska Dagbladet have developed a format for quick and concise news reading called SvD Kompakt, designed to appeal to “the young and curious.”Social-first influencers
Bulgaria:
Instrumental in the election success of far-right parties are popular “influencer” social media personalities and vloggers, with their own YouTube or Patreon channels promoting anti-establishment, nationalist, or pro-Russian viewpoints. Notable examples are the former athlete Kiril Kirilov, and Martin Karbowski, with 233,000 YouTube subscribers, who positions his channel as a source for discussions and questions absent from traditional television.France:
The impressive success of explainers and formats like HugoDécrypte’s YouTube videos reflects the strong desire, particularly of younger audiences, to be informed, but in a more relatable way. A fifth (22%) of under-35s survey respondents had seen him commenting on or discussing the news in the previous week.Greece:
A growing far-right landscape of YouTuber news influencers has emerged, many of whom have ties to the now-defunct Neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, and spread conspiracy theories. Many of these YouTubers have larger online audiences than major news media organizations. Their videos are sensationalist and often revolve around topics like ultra-conservative Orthodoxy, Turkey, or support of Trump’s and Putin’s policies.Hungary:
Social media platforms also facilitated the emergence of opposition leader Péter Magyar as a formidable challenger to Prime Minister Orbán. Magyar gave his breakthrough interview not to traditional media but to an independent YouTube channel, Partizán. Partizán is an increasingly influential independent voice on the media market. Since its inception in 2018, it has been experimenting with various formats and topics. Now it is among the top 10 most-used news sources in our survey. The interview with Péter Magyar garnered over 2.7 million views, extraordinary in a country of around 10 million people.Threats to press freedom
Turkey:
During 2024, Turkish media faced significant legal and governmental pressures, with at least 10 journalists arrested and 57 detained. More than 30 journalists were sentenced for offense such as “insulting public officials,” “inciting violence against law enforcement,” “spreading misleading information,” and “promoting terrorist organizations.” Three journalists faced charges for insulting the president, and around 17 others are currently on trial, facing prison sentences of up to nearly five years for similar offenses.Bulgaria:
In a landmark decision for the Bulgarian media environment, in June 2024, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) issued a unanimous judgment in the long running case of the Bulgarian reporter Rosen Bosev (Bosev v. Bulgaria) who appealed his 2017 conviction of defamation of a senior government official. The Court held that there had been a violation of the journalist’s right to a fair trial and a violation of the right to the freedom of expression. The case is significant in the context of increased use of Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) by public officials to silence critical journalism.Croatia:
The Croatian Journalists Association reported 752 active lawsuits against journalists in 2024, down from 945 in the previous year, but still a high number. One independent study found that of 1,333 lawsuits against journalists in the period from 2016 to 2023, 41% had at least one characteristic of a SLAPP suit. The study also found that cases took an average of four years, and most judgments found in favor of the journalists.Creative attempts to reach young audiences
The Netherlands:
Having successfully built young audiences on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, public broadcaster NOS continues to experiment with new online spaces. Their youth-oriented brand NOS op 3 previously tried out livestreaming on Twitch, and last year their child-oriented (ages 9–12) brand Jeugdjournaal published its own game on Roblox, a free online gaming platform popular with children and teens. The game features a virtual remake of the Jeugdjournaal studio, where children can play at being reporters and participate in news quizzes.Portugal:
The government is implementing initiatives like free digital news subscriptions for 15–18-year-olds as part of broader media literacy efforts, aiming to foster the habit of news consumption and, at the same time, a culture of paying for digital news, which may in turn help the ailing media sector.Other interesting findings
Denmark:
Newspapers are responding to decreasing traffic from social media with more differentiated pay models, including bundling packages. Politiken and Berlingske, respectively, offer readers access to The New York Times and Wall Street Journal.Slovakia:
Although Slovaks have a lower-than-average interest in all kinds of news, they represent an outlier among countries covered by the DNR in declaring a greater interest in local than national news. This is despite large swathes of the country being “local news deserts,” according to Transparency International.Switzerland:
The larger publishers are still pursuing a strategy to pool their data together in a Digital Alliance. While the sharing of traffic and user data seems to be on track in their project OneID, their project OneLog, which involves a shared, single login across news brands, is still only partially operational after a cyber-attack in late 2024.
Dispatches from Africa and Australia
Kenya
Unlike previous protests led by political figures or civil society organizations, these leaderless demonstrations [in 2024] relied on decentralized digital strategies. Live-streamed videos on TikTok allowed the demonstrators to bypass mainstream media gatekeeping and censorship, documenting police crackdowns in real time, countering government narratives, and drawing international attention. X Spaces facilitated instant live discussions, with President William Ruto himself joining one in an attempt to placate protesters. WhatsApp groups provided logistical coordination, including updates on safe routes, legal aid, and first-aid support.Morocco
YouTube is especially used by bloggers, political commentators, and other influencers to publish content that is on the border of what is accepted speech in Morocco. Alongside them are the recently released journalists — most notably Soulaimane Raissouni, Omar Radi, and Taoufik Bouachrine. Bouachrine, in particular, quickly returned to the public conversation, launching his own YouTube podcast titled Talk on Politics, where he has been calling for deeper political and media reforms.Nigeria
Media organizations are also using AI-driven solutions to combat misinformation, with the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development recently launching Dubawa.ai, an AI-powered fact-checking chatbot to verify information and counter false narratives, while Dataphyte introduced Nubia, a tool that enables newsrooms to analyze complex datasets and produce data-driven stories efficiently.The Digital Switch-Over (DSO) project, spearheaded by the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), is expected to be completed in 2025. President Bola Tinubu recently approved a 10bn naira ($6.3m) grant to accelerate the project which will enhance coverage and clarity of news channels, ensuring that more Nigerians, especially in underserved and rural areas, have greater access to credible news.
Australia
In March 2025, News Corp announced plans for a generative AI tool in its newsrooms. The company has been using AI to produce local news stories since 2023, but the introduction of their own in-house tool, NewsGPT, suggests a major focus on AI as part of their journalistic workflow.
Dispatches from the Americas
Argentina
Brazil
The use of AI in Brazilian newsrooms spans an increasingly wide range of applications, including speeding up the translation of agency articles, transforming written content into short videos, and producing insights from vast amounts of unstructured data. The newspaper O Globo, for example, published a series of stories based on 600,000 speeches made in the House of Representatives and the Senate between 2001 and 2024.Canada
Some [legacy publishers] are trying flexible pricing to attract new subscribers: the Torstar newspaper chain, owner of the Toronto Star, became the first to launch a pay-as-you-go model for online news content, under which a single article costs $0.75 and daily payments are capped at CAN$1.50 for full access. The company said if someone has full access just once a week, they will be paying close to what an annual subscriber pays.Chile
Mega was the most-watched free-to-air television channel this year, the most-visited online news source, and the only major player to turn a profit. One of its key initiatives was launching two streaming channels: one providing 24-hour news coverage and another for weather information. These are available across multiple platforms, including YouTube and Mega’s own streaming service. Similarly, Canal 13 introduced the first 24/7 news channel accessible on free-to-air television. CNN Chile meanwhile launched a radio and podcast initiative that is available across platforms, including its own app and AM radio.Mexico
The range of content offered by widely recognized journalists through podcasts has grown, for instance Así las cosas (That’s the Way It Is) hosted by sometime war correspondent and television host Carlos Loret de Mola, although podcasts are not yet people’s primary means of accessing news. Loret de Mola is also popular on YouTube, where he and other former legacy TV anchors and newspaper columnists are building personal audiences.Another popular YouTuber, 22-year-old journalist, Manuel Pedrero, hosts an influential daily news commentary show called Sin Máscaras (Without Masks). He is known for his unfiltered and straightforward opinions though is also openly pro-government and is widely seen as receiving preferential treatment. Another show, Sin Embargo, is the most successful on YouTube from a small non-legacy media outlet, with 2.25 million subscribers. Its leading journalists, Álvaro Delgado and Alejandro Paez, have now become stars of legacy media at Canal Once, the most important public channel in the country.
Peru
Canal Ya is a streaming channel on YouTube and other platforms devoted to journalistic content while La Roro Network, which started as an entertainment-based streamer aimed at ordinary Peruvians, has expanded its programming to political analysis and debate.However, many politicians, including candidates, are sidestepping the media altogether, especially encounters where they could face scrutiny, instead opting to appear with influencers for light, superficial interviews. The most striking example was the visit by U.S. YouTuber IShowSpeed (Darren Jason Watkins Jr.), who was briefly named “Mayor of Lima for an Hour” by López Aliaga — an apparent attempt to leverage the influencer’s 38 million YouTube followers.
Dispatches from Asia
Hong Kong
RTHK made headlines in 2023 with the introduction of its AI presenter, “Aida,” which delivered daily summaries of the Hong Kong weather report. In 2024, it established its “AI Lab” to explore ways to leverage AI technologies in its program production processes, such as using AI presenters for its sports and health-related podcasts. These initiatives indicate that RTHK is, at least publicly, at the forefront of AI development in the industry.India
Veteran journalists like Ravish Kumar from traditional newsrooms like NDTV too have moved away and leveraged video-based social media platforms to start their news channels where they have more freedom to express their own views. Content creators and young influencers, who focus on news through YouTube, are popular among our respondents. Influencers like Dhruv Rathee who commands around 28 million subscribers on YouTube were particularly popular during the general elections.Indonesia
Although Indonesians are generally unwilling to pay for news, there was some experimentation with new models. Tempo, for example, has created a partnership with provincial media such as The Aceh Post where they both share content and allow readers to subscribe to both online publications for a single price.
Japan
A “free news culture,” where advertising is seen as the main way to fund news, has made it hard for publishers to charge readers directly for online news. One notable exception has been the economic daily, Nikkei, which reached the milestone of a million digital paid subscribers in 2024, even more if you include smaller publications owned by the group. Nikkei achieved this target partly by leaning into corporate (B2B) subscriptions and its digital paid readership is now close to its print circulation of 1.3 million.Meanwhile, AI is gradually being integrated into publisher news services. Yahoo! News has introduced an AI feature which detects offensive comments and asks users to reconsider before posting. It is up to the users whether to follow the advice, but the company says offensive comments have declined by 24% since the service was launched.
Philippines
Rappler launched Rai, an in-house chatbot that guides users to verified information and election explainers. VERA Files deployed VERA, an AI-assisted fact-checking bot, on Facebook Messenger after piloting a tipline on Viber. The Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism turned one of its long-form reports into an AI-generated animated video to reach broader audiences.South Korea
Investigative journalism is rapidly dwindling in South Korea. Major newspapers, including Kukmin Ilbo, Chosun Ilbo, and Segye Ilbo, have disbanded their investigative reporting teams. Broadcast networks are faring rather better, as KBS retains a four-person investigative team, and YTN and MBC also operate similar units, although SBS halved its 10-member team. Some newsrooms are adapting. Hankook Ilbo’s Excellence Lab fosters collaboration between investigative and news teams, while Dong-A Ilbo’s Hero Squad rotates frontline reporters through digital teams.Taiwan
The Reporter, a nonprofit independent media outlet, strengthened its community through impactful journalism and innovative strategies. Known for its investigations into human-rights areas such as sexual exploitation and human trafficking, it embraced multimedia storytelling, podcasts, short videos, comic-based journalism, and live events, and won numerous domestic and international awards.Thailand
AI-generated news is also expanding in Thailand, with Nation TV introducing virtual anchors. The first AI presenter, Natcha, debuted in April 2024 during the News Alert program, followed shortly by Marisa of Mono 29 in May 2024. The public broadcaster, Thai PBS, is moving forward with plans to use AI to enhance its news service, highlighting the need to balance cost, credibility, and appearance when choosing between human presenters and AI avatars, with legal considerations. The willingness of publishers to experiment may partially explain why Thai audiences seem to be more comfortable with different uses of AI in news than most other countries in our survey — specifically around features such as summarization and automated translation.
