Media just passed a notable milestone. For the first time, people now get their news from social media and video networks like YouTube more than from any other source.
That comes from the most recent Reuters Institute Digital News Report, now in its 15th year. Across audiences, 54% of people get news from social media and video networks, passing what used to be the primary sources, publisher websites (51%) and TV (52%).
At the same time, the report shows trust in media is once again at an all-time low. Just 37% of people say they trust most news most of the time, the lowest reading since Reuters started tracking it in 2015, and in the United States the figure sinks to 25%. This isn’t surprising. The slide shows up in other long-running measures too. Gallup’s latest, from October 2025, put U.S. trust in mass media at a record-low 28%, down from 31% the year before and 40% five years ago.
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All of this suggests media brands are becoming more diluted and less relevant, are maybe even on their way out. AI chatbots, which synthesize content from several sources into summaries, may be adding to the problem. The Reuters report puts news consumption via AI chatbots at 10%, but it’s growing fast, up from 7% a year ago.
All of it feeds the idea that as AI works its way deeper into our media ecosystem, publishers will turn into something closer to information wholesalers. The atomic unit of journalism—a common source of debate since generative AI came on the scene—becomes the original facts, quotes, and insights an AI can “mine” from various sources, then interpret and remix. Individual media brands fade to the background.
What the clicks give away
Except if you go deeper into the data, that’s not the whole picture.
Most news consumption on social media is surface level. People see news posts or videos mixed in with the fitness tips, gadget ads, and every other attention-splintering piece of content in their feeds. The report even identifies a growing group, now 12% of people and double the 2020 level, who get news only by bumping into it on social platforms while they’re online for something else.
People treat AI portals differently from search and social. Among people who click out of an AI answer, 44% do it to verify the news is correct, against 36% on search and 33% on social. Another 43% click to find out more about the source, versus 35% and 34%. Only 51% click simply for more detail, well below the 59% on search and 60% on social.
That suggests AI users aren’t just looking for more facts when they click—they want to check accuracy. In those moments, the brand counts for a lot. You’re going to trust that a national newspaper runs a tighter verification process than some random blogger. Inside an interface that supposedly erases your byline, people are reaching past the machine to a trusted name to check the machine.
That exposes the weakness in the media-trust narrative. The overall trend is real, but it’s an aggregate, and we don’t live in the aggregate. People may distrust “the news” broadly but still trust the specific sources they’re familiar with. The report bears this out. Even as overall trust fell in 29 of the 48 markets surveyed, trust in the most widely used individual brands held up, with several established names defying the broader slide. Behavior and trust point the same way, toward the names people already recognize and rely on.
So trust still matters. Brands still matter. They may be the best anchor for building real audience as AI keeps embedding itself in every information surface.
Trust doesn’t cash out
The slice of the audience using AI for news is still small, just 10%, and only 1% call it their main source. But it’s growing fast, and it’s a category favored by the most engaged, highest-interest news consumers. Among the biggest news lovers, 18% already use AI for news. That’s the audience every publication is desperately trying to court, and the one where trust counts the most.
That said, you can’t take trust to the bank and cash it in. Readers verifying stories through your brand doesn’t automatically monetize, and that goes double for readers who treat your name inside an AI summary as a stamp of validation without ever clicking.
Still, that trust is valuable. A click may not be worth much, but being the default name people reach for when they doubt the machine is how trust concentrates. That trust converts everywhere else: in subscriptions, in shares, in the readers who pay because they believe the work matters. Nearly half of the people who pay for news (46%) now cite that kind of values-based reason, not just the content they’re buying.
Quit playing defense
The headline finding of the Reuters report suggests that social presence matters more than ever, and that publishers should pump out more content for those surfaces. The popularity of video networks in particular has pushed short-form videos and clips to the front of the line. And on AI, publishers are often blocking crawlers outright.
But that’s playing defense. It’s fine tactically, but treat it as the whole game and you lose. To play offense, you have to fight to become the default name people check in your lane.
So yes, use social media, but not as an end in itself. Use it to give casual readers a taste that funnels into a brand relationship. Block unauthorized crawlers, but pair that with clean, machine-readable paths that make your content available to partners and good-faith actors. Video clips are great, but they should work as a taste of the deep, detailed, comprehensive content that builds a brand a clearly defined reader will value over a longer horizon than a drive-by view.
The rise of news creators makes the same point. About 27% of people now get news from creators who explicitly focus on news, and 46% from creators of any kind. Audiences say those creators are more entertaining, easier to understand, and more relatable than traditional outlets, but they also rate them lower on trust and impartiality. Also, creator audiences consume more traditional media than the average person, not less—only 3% rely on creators alone. Once again, reliable brands are there to pick up the trust relationship.
Our media ecosystem is fragmenting. That much is obvious, with social networks, short-form video, and AI chatbots slicing audiences and content into smaller and smaller pieces in the name of convenience. But behavior cuts the other way. The more the news gets chopped up, the harder people lean on a trusted name to sort what’s real from what isn’t. Audiences take their news in smaller bites now, but the quality of the chef still matters.
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