News consumers around the world are now turning more to social media and video platforms than traditional outlets for information, a respected report said Tuesday, warning that old-style business models are under threat. The year 2026 marks "a significant milestone: for the first time, social media and video network consumption is now ahead of other news sources as the most widely used source of news globally", at 54 per cent, wrote Jim Egan, lead author of the report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. The annual report from the institute, attached to the University of Oxford, is a closely watched tracker of trends reshaping the news media. Researchers based their findings on online surveys of almost 100,000 people in 48 countries, run early this year by pollsters YouGov. This year's edition found 54 per cent of respondents said they got news from social media or video platforms in the week before the survey – rising to 56 per cent if AI chatbots like ChatGPT were included. That outstripped the 52 per cent who referenced TV news, 51 per cent for newspaper apps or websites, and 21 per cent for radio.
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