The way people consume news and information has completely changed and, as a result, the media landscape is changing too.
We’ve recently seen the BBC announce 550 job cuts in news, nations and TV and radio content as part of a £500m savings plan, and publishers are facing constantly dwindling newspaper and magazine sales. Meanwhile, online news and social media news consumption has become a mainstay – but the content that’s shown on these platforms is changing.
While publishers and platforms jostle for position, more and more people are both losing interest in the news or avoiding it altogether. So where are people getting their information from, and how should companies now try to reach people through PR and marketing?
The best insight into news consumption you’ll ever get
The Digital News Report 2026 from the Reuters Institute of Journalism offers the gold standard of news media insights. Offering a detailed look at how people are consuming news and how this is changing over time, the report is based on data from almost 100,000 individual survey respondents across 48 different countries, including over 2,000 people in the UK.
Reports like this are extremely valuable for us PR professionals, because they reveal insights that could potentially change the way we target the audiences our clients want to reach.
Here, we explore some of the report’s most important findings for businesses and marketers in the UK and how we can be responding to them.
Online news remains dominant
The majority of people in the UK (75%) consume news via online sources including news websites/apps, social/video networks, news podcasts and AI chatbots. This is followed by TV (47%), social media (40%) and print (12%).
These figures are likely a result of Gen Z news consumption, with younger people opting for social media outlets as primary sources of news at a much higher rate than older generations.
The popularity of online news video is growing and the reach of broadcast TV news is waning, meaning that watching news online has now overtaken watching TV news almost everywhere – and this line was crossed in the UK in 2026.
The top social, messaging and video networks for news are Facebook (21%), YouTube (16%) and WhatsApp (12%), but this is a surprise considering concerns about social media are among the highest in the UK. 73% of Britons say they distrust news on social media and 77% express concerns about fake news and misinformation. And if you’re wondering actually what is fake news, it’s false, fabricated or misleading information presented as legitimate journalism, designed to deceive readers and generate higher internet traffic.
The biggest news media in the UK
When it comes to TV, radio and print media, BBC News is the most consumed news media in the UK, with 48% watching or listening each week. This puts it a long way ahead of its nearest competitor, ITV News (24%) and the best performing newspaper, Daily Mail/Mail on Sunday (8%).
It’s the same when it comes to online news, with BBC News online being read by 45% of people, compared to 15% who read its nearest competitor, Guardian online, and 13% for Sky News online.
Are people turning away from the news?
More and more, people are deliberately avoiding news content, with 50% of people in the UK saying they avoid the news sometimes/often. This is a 4% increase compared to previous figures, suggesting the problem is only getting worse for the news industry.
This is a result of people becoming fatigued by the onslaught of divisive, negative, worrying or upsetting news following the pandemic, elections, the war in the Middle East, and also rising distrust in the news and journalism. Indeed, many ‘news avoiders’ say they want more positive news stories and they’re less interested in the big stories of the day.
Across the UK, trust in news is down 5% compared to 2025 – even after some years of stability. The overall trust in news is 30%, compared to a global average of 37%. Brands with the most trust are BBC News (59%), Channel 4 (57%) and ITV News (57%), whereas those with the lowest trust levels are The Sun (15%), MSN News (21%) and The Daily Mirror (21%).
A matter of trust
Trust is a critical part of what we try to accomplish through PR. One of our goals is to get trusted, third party media to amplify our clients’ marketing messages – increasing awareness of their brand, boosting their credibility, affirming their claims or demonstrating their expertise.
But there seems to be a problem with that, because while 51% of people in the UK trusted news and journalism in 2015, it now stands at just 30%.
While this might, at first, seem alarming, before you throw out your PR strategy, it’s worth considering the sheer size of the audiences for news publications, which attract many millions of readers. Around the world, BBC News reaches 418 million people every week and The Sun is read by 22.2 million readers every month. These are massive, massive audiences so, even if only a small percentage of the UK population in general trust The Sun, for example, there are still many hundreds of thousands of Sun readers who do – so it’s not time to give up on mainstream media as a PR target yet.
Lessons for PRs and marketers
There are many lessons we can draw from these findings, as PR and marketing professionals.
Firstly, this report shows that many trends we’d seen previously are continuing, but it is very interesting that trust for the more impartial broadcast and online media outlets remains the highest, while trust in general decreases. This should inform which publishers we should prioritise.
With audiences reducing across the board, particularly for print newspapers, we should perhaps focus our efforts more toward online platforms and social media news consumption than before – particularly if we’re to reach audiences through their preferred gateways of social media and news podcasts.
Crucially, we also need to be wary of the importance of the public’s need for news they feel they can trust, as well as journalists’ need to make content that is trustworthy. To stay on top of this, the content we supply to publishers must be truthful and accurate, being supported by reliable, transparent data, honest opinion and evidence where appropriate.
As well as this, we should also be looking beyond traditional approaches and seize the ever growing opportunities that new media consumption habits represent. As people turn away from traditional news media, they’re turning to a wealth of new and growing alternative content producers that should increasingly become targets for our PR endeavours… even if they’re not so trustworthy.
Lastly, we shouldn’t feel obliged to only offer serious, hard-hitting news stories that cover negative angles. While, from experience, these have typically gained greater media coverage than positive stories, audiences are getting sick of divisive, miserable news and that’s turning them away…. Or so they say.
If you’d like help identifying the best channels to reach your target audience, and developing a PR strategy to do so, get in touch with our expert team today – we’d love to hear from you.
