A global survey shows power continuing to move from publishers to platforms, with AI playing a growing role.
In June, the Reuters Institute at Oxford released its annual Digital News Report , offering a wealth of insight into changes unfolding in news consumption around the world.
The report’s main finding is that for the time in its fifteen-year history, platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube are more popular sources of news, on a global average, than TV and legacy news venues. But only slightly. While some 54 per cent of users report getting their news from platforms, 52 per cent still get it from TV and 51 per cent from news sites and apps directly.
The report contains many other details likely to be helpful to people in all parts of the news ecosystem trying to sort out where things are headed. Among the clearest trends is that people under 35 are moving toward platforms and video, and away from TV, radio, and especially newspapers.
While only 30 per cent of users identify social media and video platforms as their main source of news, and only 12 per cent rely on these exclusively, younger people are much more likely to rely on platforms. The report also finds little reason to expect them simply to adopt the news habits of older generations as they age. Over the past five years, use of news sites and apps has fallen by 12 percentage points, and use of TV news by 13 points.
The drift toward platforms will give companies like Meta and Google and their algorithms increasing power over the way news is shared, presented, and even produced — and therefore, increasing power over the democratic deliberation and debate that once took place mainly through traditional media, including print, radio, and TV.
What about the impact of AI on news consumption?
AI factors into this in two ways. People query AI chatbots for news or more detail about stories they’re following. They also encounter information about events through AI summaries or ‘answer engines’ on Google or Perplexity.
There’s a broader concern about the impact AI summaries are having on publisher content on the web — about AI summaries diverting so much traffic from sites publishing original content that it could decimate the web. The Reuters report didn’t canvas users about the impact of AI summaries on search engines are impacting news consumption, though it does cite evidence that Google traffic to news sites has fallen substantially.
The report looks instead at how people are using standalone chatbots for news.
Globally, some 10 per cent of people surveyed reported using a chatbot like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity for news in the previous week, up from 7 per cent the year prior. But growth has been uneven, concentrated among those under 35 and higher in some countries than others. In the US, the UK, France, and Germany, it didn’t increase at all.
The people who use standalone chatbots for news also tend to be unusually engaged news consumers who consult multiple sources. Among them, 42 per cent of users say they often or always click through to an original source. That is slightly below search engines, at 44 per cent, but above social media, at 36 per cent.
The single most commonly cited reason people click through to original sources, the report found, was to obtain more detail about a story — although chatbot users were somewhat more likely than people using search or social media to click through to verify the information or learn more about its source.
The larger takeaway is clear. Power over news consumption continues to shift from older broadcast media to big tech platforms. AI isn’t a primary source of news for almost anyone. But it may add to a longer-running shift from news producers to intermediaries who don’t produce it or depend on it.
The conclusion in the report’s segment on AI is worth quoting:
For publishers already struggling with weakening links to audiences, this suggests a need to focus not only on visibility, but on what makes their journalism distinct, including their role as trusted sources in a noisy information environment and deeper reporting that goes beyond what AI can easily replicate. ■
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