The long-running global study in news consumption habits and trends — the 2025 Digital News Report (DNR) — comes at an interesting time for Australian media.
The survey, delivered by YouGov to a representative panel of 2006 participants, was conducted towards the end of January. This was two months before the presence of influencers and new media at the 2025 budget lock-up sparked bitter and unproductive media discourse in both directions, and in the lead-up to what was anticipated to be the official election period.
Speaking to voters, Crikey readers and other journalists throughout the election, there was a distinct feeling that trust in Australian news outlets has never been lower.
But the 2025 report paints a more complex picture of what Australian news readers trust, and whose work they are looking to on digital platforms.
Trust in Australian news
Related Article Block Placeholder
Article ID: 1210259
Trust in news has stayed more or less the same over the past 10 years, with 43% (up three points compared to 2024) of respondents saying they trust the news in Australia in general. The same goes for people’s trust in their preferred news sources — with 49% (down one point) saying they feel they can trust what they consume.
While trust has remained steady, distrust has also grown over the past 10 years. In 2025, 32% say they distrust the news most of the time, up from 25% in 2016. The solutions that respondents proposed to reduce distrust are all commonly discussed ideas: less bias and opinion; more facts and accuracy; independence.
To have almost one-third of news consumers actively distrust the media is not good news for an industry struggling with many existential challenges, which are also tackled in this report. While TV remains the main source of news for most respondents (37%), in 2025 social media has taken second place for the first time, overtaking online news. It is now the main source of news for 26% of people.
But the perception that this distrust and platform shift is “killing” Australian news and making them irrelevant in comparison to “news influencers” isn’t the whole story.
Although more people get their news from social media than ever, the report shows they still want that news to come from the media establishment.
Traditional news media/journalists are the top news source for every single social platform: Facebook, X, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok.
Even when broken down by age, people under 35 consume more news from traditional news and journalists on Facebook and Instagram. On TikTok, they get news equally from traditional news as from “news creators”. YouTube is the only platform where news creators outrank traditional media (32% to 28%).
It shows a change in where people find news, rather than a shift in the content they want.
As I’ve written before, TV shows often branded as “outdated”, such as Q+A and Sunrise, perform incredibly well on social video platforms. After The Project’s axing last week, head writer and supervising producer Hunter Smith told The Briefing podcast that clips from the show do so well on social media that its online presence was the most successful of any Australian news show.
Related Article Block Placeholder
Article ID: 1209979
“The sort of numbers The Project can rack up on any given day, on YouTube and Instagram primarily, is staggering. You could argue the exact same people are watching The Project, they’re just watching in a completely different way.”
When it comes to AI — the other big, existential threat to news journalism — it’s a similarly nuanced picture. The headline is that Australians are becoming more comfortable with AI-produced news, but the “how” matters. Only 21% of people are comfortable with news that is mostly AI-generated, whereas 43% say they are comfortable with news “produced mostly by a human journalist with some help from AI”.
The DNR findings put into context some of the changes being made at Australian news outlets, big and small. It’s clear people still want and need news from journalists working at established media organisations, no matter how much we all gripe about distrust and egregious failures in honest reporting. As ever, the challenge lies in how news outlets adapt their journalism to these newer platforms, which come with new conventions, in a financially viable and sustainable way. A tale as old as time.