What’s buried in the Reuters Digital News Report
One night over the summer I sat in a pub with a couple of old friends and we started talking about what we were reading. One of them said he was now mostly re-reading books. His rationale was that the first time you read a novel you spend most of your attention getting to grips with the broad outline of the plot. The second time around, however, you are really reading it: you see the wider themes, the foreshadowing, the extended metaphors, the authorial choices, the details.
With that in mind, and with a transatlantic flight to fill this week, I decided to re-read the Reuters Digital News Report 2025. After its publication each spring there is a race to produce a quick summary and a hot take. Many of them are very good indeed (check out some of them here at Journalism.co.uk).
But I thought I’d revisit the report this week to see if any wider themes jumped out on a second read – I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to find anything new. Certainly a few points were clearer to me second time around.
First, was the increasing realisation that we live in the video age. Just think about the numbers in these two extracts from the report:
“Across all markets the proportion consuming social video [as a source of news] has grown from 52% in 2020 to 65% in 2025 and any video from 67% to 75%.”
“Consumption of online video has also jumped significantly in the last two years, after a period where it had remained relatively static. In the United States, for example, the proportion consuming any news video weekly has grown from just over half (55%) in 2021 to around three-quarters (72%) today.”
Not every market is like America, of course, but it tends to be a pretty reliable beacon of where we are heading. A jump in just four years from half to three-quarters of people consuming news video feels very significant.
Don’t lay off all your writers just yet though. Text remains popular, though naturally not as dominant as it once was. The future is evidently multi-modal.
“Overall, we find that audiences on average across all markets still prefer text (55%), which provides both speed and control from a consumers’ perspective, but around a third (31%) say they prefer to watch the news online and more than one in ten (15%) say they prefer to listen.”
Typically, news publishers are built around providing news in text form. This research shows that it is crucial they also have the right numbers of people and the right skills to produce video and audio.
At HBM Advisory, we have noticed that publishers are instinctively wary of personalisation of their content; we think because they worry about losing their editorial control. We advise that they put these fears aside. When thinking about the multi-modal point above, I was struck that this is where publishers should direct their personalisation efforts for now, especially given remarks like this:
“We find that interest in options for adjusting the format and style of news is higher than options for personalising the selection of stories, likely linked to … concerns about missing out. This is especially important because, so far, news media have used automation more for personalised selection than for changing the form of the content itself.”
This much is in front of us even if we sometimes would prefer to avert our eyes. But I also found a crucial passage on how readers themselves think news media could improve. For me, this is the most important section of this year’s report.
Regular readers will know that I have long believed that it's not just the delivery and discoverability of news that need to change but journalism itself, particularly in terms of responding to their audiences’ needs. The report lists four pointers from readers themselves about what they want, which its authors say are consistent across countries and also with previous research. I think this is gold dust.
“1. Impartiality: The most frequently mentioned audience complaint relates to the perception that news media push their own agenda rather than presenting evidence in a balanced way. Many respondents say that journalists need to leave their personal feelings at the door. Avoiding loaded or sensationalist language was a repeated theme.
2. Accuracy and truth telling: Audiences would like journalists to focus on the facts, avoid speculation and hearsay, and to verify and fact-check stories before publishing. Fact-checking the false claims of others was another suggestion to improve the trust of a particular brand.
3. Transparency: Respondents would like to see more evidence for claims, including fuller disclosure of sources, and better transparency over funding and conflicts of interest. More prominent corrections when publications get things wrong would be appreciated, along with clearer and more distinct labelling around news and opinion.
4. Better reporting: Respondents wanted journalists to spend their time investigating powerful people and providing depth rather than chasing algorithms for clicks. Employing more beat reporters who were true specialists in their field was another suggestion for improving trust.”
Many might say: “Well, we do all that already.” The point is that readers don’t think so. And here they have provided a clear and eminently actionable list of concerns to address. I think we would be foolish as an industry not to do so as an absolute priority.