In the year that witnessed one of the most globally consequential electoral cycles, the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2025 reveals a deeply unsettling truth: evidence-based journalism is losing its societal grip, supplanted by a diffuse, personality-driven media ecology powered by platforms. While trust in news remains nominally stable at 40%, the report’s findings suggest the structure of that trust—and its distribution—has been irrevocably altered.

The crisis is not merely one of audience but of epistemology. Institutional journalism, once the arbiter of civic discourse, is increasingly sidelined by social media influencers, podcasters, and YouTubers who command loyal followings yet often bypass editorial oversight, accountability norms, or even fidelity to truth. This new ecosystem is both attractive and dangerous, offering connection and relatability at the cost of coherence and reliability.

The 2025 report documents a steady decline in the use of traditional media (TV, print, and websites) across 48 markets, encompassing over half the world’s population. Social media and video platforms are now dominant, especially among the under-35 demographic.

In the United States, for the first time, social/video networks have overtaken both TV and news websites as primary sources of news—an inversion of the “Trump bump” of 2016 that temporarily lifted all news boats. Now, only the digital waves rise, but they carry different vessels: Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, and HugoDécrypte, not The New York Times or Le Monde.

Crucially, the crisis is not simply about access or habits but perception. Influencers and national politicians are perceived globally as the most significant vectors of misinformation, each named by 47% of respondents. This raises critical questions:

Why do so many turn to those they simultaneously mistrust? And how can journalism reclaim its role without reverting to paternalism or nostalgia?

AI platforms further complicate the picture. While only 7% of respondents use AI chatbots for news (15% among under-25s), their potential to reshape how news is encountered is vast. Generative summarization, translation, and personalization are met with ambivalence. They are seen as increasing efficiency and accessibility, but also lowering transparency and trust. This ambivalence mirrors a broader tension—audiences desire immediacy and relevance, yet recoil from algorithmic opacity.

Moreover, the notion that young audiences avoid news entirely is too reductive. They are not disengaged—they are elsewhere, on TikTok, YouTube, WhatsApp, and emerging formats like news podcasts, particularly among younger and better-educated users. Yet even as the form changes, the content is increasingly unmoored from institutional accountability. Only 3% of 18–24-year-olds named printed newspapers a primary news source; 44% cited social media and video networks. The genre of news merges entertainment, commentary, and lifestyle.

The commercial model is equally strained. Despite publisher hopes, only 18% of users across 20 affluent markets pay for online news, a figure essentially unchanged from last year. Nordic countries lead, with Norway at 42%, while markets like Greece and Serbia languish below 7%. This raises complicated questions about sustainability and equity. If news becomes a premium product, are we resigning the majority to the domain of the algorithm and the influencer?

The findings should be read as neither an elegy nor a eulogy. They are a demand for reimagining journalism’s institutional compact. The media’s future will not be won by chasing virality or by doubling down on legacy formats. Instead, it requires investing in new forms of storytelling—short-form video, creator partnerships, hybrid podcast-visual formats—that do not abandon editorial rigour. It also means resisting platform dependency by building community-based models of distribution, particularly in underserved regions.

Perhaps the most promising sign lies in user behaviour around misinformation. When asked how they verify information, people still overwhelmingly cite trusted news brands and government sources—proof that journalism’s residual authority, though diminished, is not extinguished. Even digital natives—those who seem most divorced from traditional news—still value credibility when it matters.

This is the journalistic paradox of our time: trust is durable, yet attention is fickle; audiences are skeptical, yet hungry for meaning. Platforms will not solve this tension—they exacerbate it. The task, then, is not to restore journalism’s past but to build its future with an architecture suited for this age: pluralistic, adaptive, and relentlessly public-minded.

If journalism fails to meet this moment, it will not be because people have ceased to need it. It will be because it failed to evolve, not in technology, but in purpose. The time for adaptation is not tomorrow. It is now.