If news is your main channel, you need to rethink it now
The Reuters Institute’s 15th Digital News Report was published last week. Read it as a communicator, not a journalist or publisher, and review your media and channel planning.
Most of the analysis treats it as a story about journalism. I’ve read it differently. The media and channels that public relations and corporate communications has leaned on for years are being reorganised beneath us.
If you use news media as a primary means of communicating with your audience then you need to rethink your approach.
Platforms have passed the news brands
For the first time, social media and video networks are the most widely used way of getting news online. They reach 54% of people, just ahead of news organisations’ own sites and apps on 51%. Add in AI chatbots and the third-party total climbs to 56%.
The authors of the report call this a drift and not a lurch. They’re right to be cautious, but the direction of travel is harder to argue with. Use of TV news and of publishers’ own sites has each dropped more than 12 points since 2020.
That should worry anyone who places a story expecting it to be read on the publication’s own page. It will more likely surface second-hand and reframed on a third party platform.
Trust keeps falling, but not evenly
Trust in news now sits at 37%. It’s the lowest the report has recorded since it started counting in 2015. In the US, only a quarter of people say they trust the news most of the time.
This isn’t about journalism. Confidence in institutions and leaders is sliding everywhere. News is caught in the macro trend.
But dig past the gloom and there’s something useful for practitioners. The big individual brands people actually read are holding their trust. News as a concept is losing credibility quicker than the publishers themselves. Where you place a story still counts.
Two further findings:
AI chatbots are creeping into the news diet, used weekly by 10%, rising to 16% of the under-35s, though growth flatlined this year in the US, the UK, France and Germany. Less than half click through to the source. The rest take the summary and go. This is the generative engine optimisation (GEO) opportunity,
Creators now more than ever. 46% get some news from them, more relatable than traditional media. The former Polish president Andrzej Duda is referenced in the report as starting a series on a YouTube news start-up rather than working through the traditional media.
How to plan for it
So what do you plan around once the channel stops being dependable?
I’ve made the case in previous newsletters for the situational theory of publics, the old Grunig and Hunt framework that Martina Topic-Rutherford revisited last year in Corporate Communications: An International Journal. This Reuters report is a good prompt to dust it off.
It organises people by behaviour, by how far they’ve clocked an issue and how moved they are to act, rather than by age or title or outlet. Behaviour holds steadier than channel especially when the media landscape is being rebuilt under your nose.
As audiences scatter across platforms, creators and chatbots, knowing which media someone half-reads tells you almost nothing. Knowing where they sit on an issue still informs what to do.
Further information
This article was originally posted on my Substack. The Wadds Inc. newsletter is read by more than 5,500 communications and public relations practitioners. We take a slower, critical perspective on the research, evidence and developments shaping the field.
