Digital News Report 2026. What you need to know

We've always thought, I think, of the Digital News Report as a barometer, a weathervane of sorts.

So pointing to where things are trending, pointing to the shifts, if you will, pointing to the drifts, as you did.

What would you say are the big takeaways for you that you think the news industry could think about from the Digital News Report 2026? Because there's quite a lot to unpack what's a good way to think about it and to look at both the realities of a changed environment, but also the points of hope.

Yeah, well, it is a year of instability, and I'm saying that in a narrow sense.

We've seen a lot of the data move this year, but I think that's reflecting a wider feeling of instability as well.

So a lot of turbulence and sort of volatility in the data echoing people's uncertainty about really dramatic changes that are happening in the world around them.

We said, as we've been discussing, interest in news is going down.

Arguably, you might say that actually interest in news is holding up pretty well given how much consumption is happening on people's mobile phones and how many other more straightforwardly entertaining opportunities there are for people to spend their time online.

I think that what we see about creators is something which, as I say, is broadly complementary and is injecting new life, new freshness, new interest into the news experience for many people.

So I think established news media has at least as much to learn and to emulate in an appropriate way as they do to be sort of rivalrous and sort of envious of the creative sector.

There are challenges, I think, for regulators and policymakers as much as there are for media operators here because how do you strike the right balance in terms of national legislation and regulatory measures in areas such as online privacy and online safety at a time when people are spending more and more of their time on these platforms, but also the mood seems to be darkening around them.

But I think one point that Richard mentioned earlier that I think news organisations should really, really focus on, even though unravelling the statistical causes of it is quite difficult, is although trust in news and the information environment is going down, trust in news organisations appears to be holding up.

As brands themselves.

As brands themselves.

And that's together with what we have about ongoing support for impartiality, ongoing positive attitudes towards the social role that public service media can play in markets around the world.

That to me feels like a call to action and rather than people sort of dwelling too much on the sort of bleakness and the difficulty and the challenges in this data to perhaps say to ourselves, well, actually, good news media is needed more than ever at this particularly uncertain time.

And that there's not so much this and that.

We're looking at quite a bit of conformity across audiences.

For a time, it was sort of like young audiences existed on an island of their own.

But now we're beginning to see similar trends in terms of their preferences, their gateways, all of it.

Yeah, I think that's right.

Although, you know, there's been a debate in the news industry for a while about will younger audiences turn into and acquire and grow up into their older counterparts.

I think actually perhaps you're seeing older audiences becoming more like younger ones.

So not quite subscribing to the newspaper yet.