June 2026

Three key themes emerge in our report this year around structural access, formats for consuming the news, and trust levels amongst audiences. The first central theme is the intensifying ‘platformisation’ of news consumption. Social media and video networks are now the most widely used sources of news globally, ahead of both TV news and news organisations’ own online properties in terms of the proportion of people using them weekly. The second theme is born of the first.

In 1838, the invention of the camera sparked predictions that photography would make artists obsolete. When the noted French painter Paul Delaroche first saw an early photograph on a metal plate, he declared that “From today, painting is dead!” As he reasoned, why would anyone pay an artist to slowly and laboriously paint a scene when a camera could do the job more accurately, more quickly, and at a lower cost? This question has echoed through technological shifts and has resurfaced with intensity in recent weeks, as university students graduated on campuses across the United States.