The headline figure from Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2026 is likely to be 37%: the proportion of people worldwide who say they trust most news most of the time, the lowest level recorded since the survey began measuring trust a decade ago.
That number will generate headlines around the world. But the report’s most important finding may lie elsewhere.
For years, journalists and researchers have focused on rising news avoidance. Yet the Reuters data point to a more fundamental shift.
People are not necessarily turning away from the news. Instead, they are increasingly encountering it through social media feeds, video platforms, search engines, messaging apps and AI tools rather than actively seeking it out.
The defining change in today’s information environment may not be declining trust in news. It may be the fact that news no longer needs to be sought out.
When news was a destination
Twentieth-century journalism was built on a simple assumption: people would come to the news.
They would open a morning newspaper or tune in to the evening bulletin. The platforms changed over time, but the logic remained the same: news organisations waited for their audiences, and audiences knew where to find them.
In the digital environment of 2026, that relationship has been reversed. Increasingly, news comes to people.
It appears in Facebook and TikTok feeds, Telegram channels, YouTube recommendations, Google search results or even within the responses of AI chatbots.
For the first time in the history of the Reuters Institute’s survey, social media and video networks have overtaken news organisations’ own websites and apps as the most widely used way of accessing news.
Globally, 54% of respondents access news via social media and video platforms each week, compared with 51% who use news organisations’ websites and apps.
This is more than a technological shift. It reflects a fundamental change in the relationship between audiences and news.
The triumph of convenience
At first glance, this development seems entirely natural. People have always gravitated towards the most convenient option available.
Yet this is where one of the report’s most interesting contradictions emerges.
On the one hand, concerns about misinformation continue to rise. Globally, 62% of respondents say they are worried about what the report describes as false or misleading information online.
On the other hand, more and more people are accessing news through platforms that are frequently criticised for spreading misinformation and amplifying algorithmic polarisation.
If trust were the only factor shaping news consumption, these two trends would be difficult to reconcile.
The Reuters data point towards a different explanation. In today’s information environment, convenience often matters more than credibility.
People are not choosing TikTok or Facebook because they trust them more than traditional news brands. They choose them because that is where they already spend their digital lives.
This is why many discussions about misinformation miss an important point: convenience frequently exerts a greater influence on news consumption than trustworthiness.
The rise of incidental news
Another finding deserves particular attention.
In 2021, 16% of respondents were classified as passive or incidental news consumers. Today, that figure has risen to 25%.
These people have not abandoned the news. They simply seek it out less often.
Instead, news appears alongside other content in social media feeds, between entertainment videos, recommendations, personal updates, and algorithmically curated posts.
This suggests that not only the source of news is changing, but the very way in which it is consumed.
Beyond the zero-click era
A few months ago, I wrote about the rise of the zero-click era, in which users increasingly receive answers without opening links or visiting the original source.
The central question then was economic: what happens to journalism when audiences stop clicking?
The Reuters report allows us to extend that question.
What happens to trust when people encounter journalism less and less as a destination, and more and more as something embedded within other platforms?
If audiences rarely meet a news organisation as a distinct institution, it becomes harder for that institution to build and sustain trust.
Part of the decline in trust may therefore be linked not only to the quality of journalism, but also to journalism’s declining visibility as an independent presence in people’s lives.
People still value impartial news
At the same time, the report highlights another important trend.
Despite all these changes, audiences continue to value the traditional principles of journalism.
Globally, 45% say they prefer news from sources that do not have a particular point of view, compared with just 22% who prefer news that shares their own perspective.
That is an important reminder at a time when we frequently hear that the era of impartial journalism is over.
The problem, it seems, is not that people no longer want quality journalism. The problem is that journalism increasingly reaches them in fragmented form, dispersed across feeds, recommendations, and intermediary platforms.
As that happens, trust gradually shifts towards the systems that control access rather than the institutions that produce the reporting.
Journalism’s new challenge
Armenia is not included in the Reuters Institute survey, so we cannot draw direct conclusions about levels of trust in news among Armenian audiences.
Yet many of the processes described in the report are clearly visible in our own information environment.
For many people, their first encounter with news no longer takes place on a news organisation’s homepage. It happens on social media or through other digital platforms that mediate access to information.
In that sense, the report’s most important finding may not be that trust is declining. It may be that news consumption is becoming increasingly passive.
People continue to stay informed. They are simply searching for news less often.
And when news appears on our screens while we scroll through social media, trust becomes dependent not only on journalism itself, but also on the platforms that determine what we see in the first place.
Perhaps that is the defining media challenge of our time.
