News

News sites are the new newspapers: People are abandoning them for social media

Nieman Lab · Nieman Lab Staff · last updated June 15, 2026 – 3:08 PM

News sites are rapidly becoming the newspapers of the digital age. And you know what happened to newspapers.

Worldwide, people in all age groups are ditching news sites and publishers’ apps in favor of social media and video networks. In fact, 18- to 34-year-olds are abandoning content on publishers’ platforms even more quickly than they’re dropping TV news.

The 2026 Digital News Report from Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) makes it clear: Almost all online news growth is coming from third-party sources, and publishers’ own sites and apps are being left behind. “Social media and video networks are now more popular as a source of news than owned and operated online news websites and apps in 30 of our 48 markets,” the authors write in the report, released Monday evening.

As for the video that publishers have spent all that time and money creating for their own sites…well. “On average, news organizations have seen video consumption on their own sites and apps fall by five percentage points from 2025,” the report’s authors write, “and by 10 points since 2021.” That decline is happening at a time when more than three quarters (77%) of RISJ’s global respondents consume online news video every week — but it’s the third-party platforms that are winning their views.

This doesn’t mean that people who get most of their news from social media are satisfied with it. Globally, “people who use social media and video networks as their main source of news are more negative about coverage of [the Ukraine conflict, inflation, Trump, Middle East conflict, climate change, and immigration],” the report’s authors note. As an example, here’s some data showing that Spanish audiences are most satisfied with news from TV:

RISJ has released a digital news report every year since 2012. This year it surveyed nearly 100,000 people in 48 countries 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.

Nieman Lab has previously reported on preliminary interview research that shows people feel a greater sense of agency or autonomy when they use products like ChatGPT and Gemini for news. The ability to ask follow-up and clarifying questions, and overall dictate what additional information they want to see, is a big draw for regular users of these products. RISJ’s survey research largely supports these findings.

Across markets, the feature most cited as a motivation for using chatbots was asking follow-up questions. In total, 42% of users mentioned this. Other interactive features also ranked high, including using AI to summarize “complicated stories” (36%) and using it to translate news from other languages (33%).

Arguedas concludes that these use cases, alongside other popular features like using chatbots to evaluate the reliability of a news source or to simplify information, indicate that audiences aren’t turning to AI for headline roundups. Instead, the draw for early and engaged users is the ability of AI products to “interrogate, summarize, and evaluate information” — in other words, “a more expansive role that combines access with interpretation.”

— Andrew Deck

Meta is (still) winning news

Since 2014, when RISJ asked people which social networks they’d used for news in the past week, Facebook came out on top. Until 2024, though, its use was in decline. In 2026, it’s seeing a “resurgence,” the report’s authors write, with 43% of respondents saying they use it for news overall and 31% saying they used it in the last week. (We’ve seen this in other studies, too.)

Instagram, meanwhile, has become the biggest social platform for news for 18- to 24-year-olds; 42% of them said they used it for news in the past week.

— Laura Hazard Owen

YouTube is the platform of choice for people seeking news

Around the world, traditional broadcasters continue to lose ground to social media, and attempts by news organizations to spin up video on their own websites and apps aren’t really helping. As the chart below shows, every platform other than news websites and apps saw user growth between 2023 and 2026, while the news websites and apps saw a 5% decline in users.

YouTube is particularly interesting here. RISJ research fellow Craig T. Robertson notes that while people tend to see news videos on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, YouTube is the only platform where the majority of users intentionally seek out the news. For the majority of Instagram and TikTok users, news just happens to come up in the feed. And while Instagram and TikTok both emphasize short videos, YouTube users still have quite a healthy appetite for longform:

Interestingly, longer news videos are relatively more popular among younger people than older people. Just over half (52%) of 18–24s watching news videos on YouTube say they watch longer news videos (over 5 minutes) weekly, compared to 41% of over 55s. Older people on YouTube are actually more likely than younger people to be watching short news videos (69% of over-55 YouTube users, compared to 60% of 18–24s, watching news videos under 6 minutes). This may be driven, in part, by younger people’s greater preference for watching news videos (compared to reading or listening to news).

There are, as always, regional differences in how people consume news videos. While video is big around the world, the countries with the highest rates of news video consumption tend to be social-first, young markets with high mobile phone usage — the study authors highlight Thailand and Peru in particular, where more than 80% of people watch some form of social news video every week — while countries with historically strong upmarket newspaper and public media brands, like the U.K. (50% weekly, up from 40% in 2021), tend to have lower social news video consumption.

Finally, the study authors asked how smart TVs play a role in news video consumption, and found significant generational gaps. While younger audiences (18-44) watch news video using smart TV apps like YouTube, older audiences (45 and up) tend to still use their TVs to watch linear broadcast TV news.

— Neel Dhanesha

The willingness to pay for news may have hit its ceiling

Across the countries that RISJ surveys, 17% of respondents say they paid for online news in the last year, compared with 18% who said the same in 2025. The number of people in the U.S. who pay for news has actually declined by 4 percentage points, though the report’s authors suggest interpreting that change with caution “as it may be the result of the uncertainty and error associated with survey sampling.”

— Laura Hazard Owen

Creators aren’t replacing traditional news

News creators around the world continue to find their place in the news ecosystem amid the “increasingly blurred lines between journalism and political activism,” RISJ senior research associate Nic Newman writes.

According to this year’s report, 27% of survey respondents in 48 countries now get news from news creators on a weekly basis, but only 13% said these creators meet most or all of their news needs.

These figures vary by country, depending on youth population differences, levels of political polarization, trust in mainstream media, and other factors. In Kenya, for example, 58% of respondents said they access content from news creators weekly and 33% said that content meets “all or most” of their news needs; in the Netherlands, the corresponding figures are 9% and 2%.

One consistent finding is that creators are rarely replacing traditional news media outright. Instead, they tend to play a more supplementary role, helping audiences to interpret, explain, critique, or react to the news rather than break stories themselves. Even in countries such as Kenya, Peru, or the United States, where reliance on creators is high, only a minority say that most or all of their news needs are met in this way.

RISJ categorizes news creators by the type of ecosystem where they are most successful:

“We are seeing the emergence of ‘hybrid journalist creator’ models where existing radio and TV stars (and others) lean into creator approaches while remaining part of the traditional media ecosystem, offering a different potential future for the industry,” Newman writes.

— Hanaa’ Tameez

TV news is losing young audiences, while radio and newspapers “have lost most of their living user base”

By 2026, we all know to expect depressing trendlines across the board when it comes to the shrinking audiences of newspapers, radio, and even TV news. This year’s RISJ report takes a closer look at what’s primarily responsible for driving the downward audience spirals in each of those three mediums. Specifically: Is the problem that “certain sources struggle to attract users in the first place? Or is it perhaps that they are more vulnerable to existing users turning away from them?”

To answer that question, the report looks at whether respondents are “current,” “lapsed,” or “never” weekly consumers of each medium, and uses that data to calculate “adoption” and “retention” rates by news source.

The data suggests that for TV news, retention is the biggest problem. With 52% of respondents currently using TV news weekly and 27% lapsed users, TV news has a high rate of adoption — 79% — while its retention rate is 66%.

That’s relatively rosy compared to radio and, especially, newspapers. Both have lower adoption rates (53% and 49% respectively) and have been “less sticky” — radio has retained 39% of listeners, and newspapers have retained just 27% of readers.

“Put differently, they have lost most of their living user base,” Richard Fletcher, RISJ’s director of research, writes. “Television news has faded out of use for many people, whereas newspapers and radio news may never have been part of the picture in the first place.”

For TV news, the biggest red flag might be the age gap in retention. “While TV news has been relatively good at retaining users who are currently aged 35 or over (71%),” Fletcher notes, “it has only retained about half of those aged 18-34 (51%).” Given the smaller age gap for adoption, the data suggest that “declines in television news use are being driven more by its failure to hold on to younger users than its ability to attract them in the first place,” a challenge that is also highly apparent in other research.

Meanwhile, for newspapers and radio, the data show that “relatively few young people have been socialized into those consumption habits in the first place.” That is, “the social reproduction of newspaper and radio news audiences may have broken down altogether.”

Apps and websites don’t appear positioned to pick up the slack; they have similar adoption and retention rates to TV news, meaning “high levels of adoption (71%) and declines primarily driven by a failure to retain audiences.” While adoption rates are “identical” across age, retention rates are 10 percentage points lower among younger people; as with TV news, “declines in the use of news websites and apps are being driven by the loss of younger former users.”

These findings, Fletcher writes, should inform news publishers because “as many devote time and energy to developing their ‘young audiences strategy,’ they may encounter a tension between focus on retention and a focus on adoption.”

He closes with a bleak reminder: The audiences abandoning these mediums, or failing to engage with them in the first place, may leave news behind entirely. “People may be content to simply carry on with a smaller news repertoire and, for a smaller minority, stepping away from a source may mean that they opt out of news altogether,” Fletcher writes. Among lapsed TV news watchers, for instance, 9% report no longer using any of the news sources RISJ asked about — including “print, radio, podcasts, social media, AI chatbots, and the websites or apps of a variety of different types of news publisher.”

That finding, he adds, is part of a trend RISJ has tracked over the years — “the structural decline of news use in general, and not just the rise and fall of specific sources.”

— Sophie Culpepper

Impartial news isn’t dead

Does the market still value impartial news? For 20th-century American newspapers and network TV news, playing it down the middle wasn’t just a journalistic ideal — it was also a heck of a business strategy. Distribution and advertising monopolies encouraged newsrooms to emphasize the “mass” in mass media rather than picking an ideological niche. But whenever new formats bloomed — talk radio in the 1980s, cable news in the 1990s, and the internet in the 2000s — the profits often went to explicitly partisan players.

This year’s DNR asked people whether they preferred getting their news from “sources that don’t have a particular point of view,” “sources that share your point of view,” or “sources that challenge your point of view.” Despite a global rise in political polarization, the most popular answer remains news without an explicit POV — though it earned only a plurality (45%) rather than a majority of responses.

(Note that this is all based on survey responses, not observational data. People are notoriously bad at describing the news they consume, overemphasizing the types of news they think sound worthy. Also, people bring their own baggage to what constitutes a news source without “a particular point of view.” To a conservative Fox News viewer, the network may well meet its former stated standard of “fair and balanced“; a liberal Guardian reader may view its editorial stance as simple common sense.)

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, who wrote this section of the report, notes that people’s stated opinions on impartial news have remained strikingly consistent over time. They’re even consistent whether people are asked about their own news consumption or the general public’s. The share of people who want news aligned with their preexisting opinions is relatively small — but it’s an unusually influential share, more engaged with politics, more likely to share stories on social media, and more likely to consume a lot of news:

The people who prefer news that aligns with their own views are a minority. But they tend to be more vocal, more highly engaged, more partisan, and more commercially important for many news publishers than the public at large.

Most striking — as is often the case in the DNR — is the variation between countries. In Germany, “news with no particular point of view” beats out “news that agrees with me” 64% to 10%. But in many countries in the Global South, the poles are flipped; in Nigeria, for instance, those numbers are 22% and 46%, respectively.

Running regressions on the country-level data, Nielsen finds that countries with higher levels of social media use for news are significantly more likely to also have higher levels of people preferring news that agrees with them. There’s also a relationship with levels of political partisanship, though the connection there is weaker.

— Joshua Benton

Perceptions of public media vary widely

In 26 countries, RISJ asked respondents a very specific question: What sort of impact do you think public service media (what we in the U.S. call public media) has on life in your country?

For the most part, people either had a positive perception (37% of respondents) or felt neutral (35%); only 22% of respondents viewed public media’s impact negatively. The two main drivers of these feelings tended to be trust in media overall and political polarization; as one might expect, respondents who identified as politically left-leaning in most countries tended to view public media positively, while those on the right viewed it negatively.

There are a few notable exceptions: In Finland, where trust in media is generally very high, people on all sides of the political spectrum viewed public media positively. In Italy, where critics accuse the right-wing government of eroding the editorial independence of the public broadcaster, people on the left tend to view public media negatively, while people on the right view it positively.

Concerns about editorial independence tend to shape people’s perceptions of public media around the world. Jim Egan, the 2026 Digital News Report’s lead author and senior research associate at RISJ, writes:

In Slovakia, recent changes have been especially controversial. The government abolished the existing public broadcaster (RTVS) and replaced it with a new entity (STVR) under a governance model that critics argue increases political control. This institutional redesign prompted protests domestically as well as international concern. While in Serbia, public broadcasting has been caught up in and shaped by ongoing political crisis and public protest. Demonstrations in 2025 directly targeted RTS, accusing it of pro-government bias and inadequate coverage. The organisation has become a focal point for wider tensions over press freedom, with declining trust, internal pressures, and ongoing disputes over editorial independence.

Interestingly, not even the critics of public media seem to be concerned that it’s muscling in on the territory of commercial news outlets, which Nielsen notes is an issue of “intense industry debate.” In general, people who use public media tend to like public media.

“Strengthening the position of public service media is less about any single intervention and more about a combination of approaches,” Nielsen writes. That includes “demonstrating independence clearly, lowering the barriers to engagement, embedding news in everyday consumption patterns, and helping audiences navigate difference in a way that supports shared understanding.”