Media watching
Two Reports on how we consume news
The Australian Joe Rogan is Joe Rogan
—Patrick Marlborough
The 2026 Digital News Report (DNR) was released recently. You can read the international version here, while the data and discussion that deals specifically with Australia is available here, through the University of Canberra. The DNR is a long-running research project that has a deal of authority in media analysis circles. It does an extraordinary job of mapping key aspects of a complex media landscape.
The overall impression is that Australia is doing a little better on some key metrics than most other Western democracies, with the Mumbrella site going so far as to say the “long-running annual report has this year found reason for optimism, with daily news consumption increasing year-on-year and younger demographics increasingly paying for news. Trust in familiar news sources is up, largely driven by younger audiences.”
If you want a good overview of the international results, NiemanLab is your friend. They note that the trend is still away from legacy media to various platforms of social media, including an uptick in the use of AI-chatbots to track news stories that people are interested in. The Reports frame all this as news websites and news apps going the same way as newspapers, that is, towards oblivion, and it seems to underline the fact that legacy media continue to fail to present news in a way that people want to engage with.
They have not made themselves destination sites is another way of putting it.
Nieman notes that “Almost all online news growth is coming from third-party sources, with publishers’ own sites and apps being left behind. ‘Social media and video networks are now more popular as a source of news than owned and operated online news websites and apps in 30 of our 48 markets’.”
They also note that “traditional broadcasters continue to lose ground to social media, and attempts by news organizations to spin up video on their own websites and apps aren’t really helping.” In fact, they say, “every platform other than news websites and apps saw user growth between 2023 and 2026, while the news websites and apps saw a 5% decline in users.”
Within this basic trend, there are some interesting nuggets, and the data on how people use YouTube is one of those.
“[W]hile people tend to see news videos on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, YouTube is the only platform where the majority of users intentionally seek out the news.” This tracks with my own experience, including the Report’s finding that, on YouTube, people are more willing to access longer videos than the ones that show up on the other video sites:
Just over half (52%) of 18–24s watching news videos on YouTube say they watch longer news videos (over 5 minutes) weekly, compared to 41% of over 55s. Older people on YouTube are actually more likely than younger people to be watching short news videos (69% of over-55 YouTube users, compared to 60% of 18–24s, watching news videos under 6 minutes). This may be driven, in part, by younger people’s greater preference for watching news videos (compared to reading or listening to news).
Such data bears out the comment you see more often these days, that YouTube is the new TV. It is a positioning YouTube themselves have encouraged. And as Ryan Broderick points out in a fascinating piece, “[YouTube] has its sights set on both working with and, assumedly, totally replacing Hollywood. In 2029, it’ll be broadcasting the Oscars. It knows it’s sitting on a massive amount of talented young filmmakers. And many its established creators are already launching full-blown TV productions on the platform now.”1
What really strikes me in reading through both Reports (the international one and the Australian one) is the way in which the discussion is framed as a sort of competition between new and old media, or between digitised platforms and legacy media like radio, television and newspapers. This is understandable to some extent, given this is more or less how the media space has played out over the last few decades. But it is a framing that encodes certain presumptions about each sphere that I think need to be better examined.
There is a tendency to presume that what the legacy media does is somehow—and nearly always—proper journalism, while anything else falls short of this presumed standard. Often the embedded assumptions are about so-called objective reporting versus opinion, and I think that is particularly tricky. I won’t get into the full discussion of whether such “objectivity” is either possible or desirable, but “objectivity” certainly can’t just be presumed as an unproblematic standard.2
As an example of what I am talking about, the chapter on Australia in the international Report contains a paragraph about the rise of non-mainstream commentators and “influencers” with the observation that, “While influencers provide a diverse range of perspectives, particularly for younger audiences, the uneven quality and the absence of agreed journalistic standards raise concerns.”
Well, it does, but something similar could be said of legacy media. You only have to look at how Pauline Hanson is being covered at the moment, including her recent appearance at the National Press Club, to have the same concerns about “agreed journalistic standards”. You only have to look at the problematic aspects of the Press Club itself.
More importantly, “influencers” and “creators” (the other word the reports use for this sort of individual) aren’t the only aspect of this emerging trend. Increasingly, the media environment is made up of refugee journalists who are using various platforms to do the sort of journalism that many mainstream sites are failing to do. Refugee in the sense that they have either been forced out of mainstream jobs or have voluntarily evacuated the legacy media because of problems they have covering certain stories.
The Australian media space has seen a surge in these sorts of “start ups” over the last few years, including Michael West Media, The Klaxon, The Shot, Lamestream Media, Cheek Media—amongst many others, going back to Crikey as the granddaddy of them all.
I don’t think it helps to frame this as mainstream versus independent media either, rather than as a welcome diversification in how journalism is understood and practiced. As one site owner quoted by the Columbia Journalism Review noted: “Journalism, no matter the source, is not a zero-sum game. There is room for the amazing work coming out of dynamic news organizations with long traditions of investigative and enterprise journalism. There is also room for upstarts who are covering the news gaps those organizations have left for consumers. We know this because consumers are, as they are wont to do, voting with their wallets.”
Another aspect of this was highlighted by Tim Duggan, the chair of the Digital Publishers Alliance and co-founder of Junkee Media, in his recent address to the Press Club. He said that “The diversity and strength of independent media is a sign of a healthy democracy. It is where many journalists begin their careers, providing a valuable training ground for the entire industry.” (My emphasis.)
This underlines the idea of an ecosphere in which there is considerable crossover, not just rigid sectors in competition with each other.
The Digital News Reports are cognisant of these developments, but I don’t think they’ve really found a way to talk about them outside that us-and-them, objective-opinion, journalist-influencer framework.3 Both Reports acknowledge the hybrid nature of the media environment without really internalising that this hybridity makes such binaries deeply problematic: that they are inherently complex and debatable concepts, with different levels of the ecosphere constantly interacting. They exist on a spectrum, not on either side of a clear divide.
The Reports also haven’t found a way to talk about the influence of organisations like Atlas and Advance—or even the pool of partisan think tanks and the like—who seek to manipulate this increasingly fragmented media landscape for political advantage. As Alex Fein wrote the other day, the current surge in Pauline Hanson’s support doesn’t make sense outside the work of such organisations, and we really need to be managing—regulating—the influence they have. As Fein says, “The fact that this operation runs partly through billionaires, platforms, and transnational political networks rather than embassies, does not make it less foreign, less coordinated, or less corrosive.”
Such considerations might be considered outside the scope of reports like the DNR, but I’m suggesting they shouldn’t be. Simply surveying media usage risks limiting our understanding of these complex interactions. To quote Fein again, with her Redbridge data hat on, “It is worth understanding the machinery, because it explains something our focus groups have been showing us for months: participants quoting near-identical pro-Hanson talking points.”
Nonetheless, the DNR does acknowledge:
First, we identify politically polarised systems where the most widely mentioned creators tend to be partisan commentators who often lead or shape public debates. Second, in countries where press freedom is under pressure, we find news creators as a source of opposition and scrutiny. Third, in a number of countries we find young news creators making their mark. Fourth, we identify a number of relatively stable democracies with fewer native news creators, where hybrid ‘journalist creator’ models are emerging. It is important to note that these creator ecosystems are not mutually exclusive; they still contain different types of creators, and not all countries in our survey map neatly onto them.
It is still a bit us-and-them, but I would be very happy if, rather than leaving this as a section within the Report, the whole thing was reframed around this understanding of hybridity.
Whatever shortcomings Reports like these display, they are useful in taking the pulse of how people consume news. They cover an enormous range of relevant issues. But increasingly, I suspect, such data will not be enough to tell us what we most need to know about the media environment we are all immersed in. It is an environment we live inside whether we like it or not, even if we are part of the steady band of “news avoiders”.4
We need to understand every aspect of it in order to appreciate how this hybrid space shapes our worldview.5
An underlying point is that these changes are undermining right-wing influencers who, the Broderick piece argues, are increasingly having trouble cutting through in the way have over recent years. “YouTube doesn’t want to be AM radio anymore and it, also, doesn’t want to be cable news,” he writes. As I say, it’s a fascinating piece.
Nieman notes an obvious problem with data that asks people to self-identify whether they prefer news that comes from sources without a particular point or view, or from sources that either support or challenge their own point of view. “People are notoriously bad at describing the news they consume, overemphasizing the types of news they think sound worthy. Also, people bring their own baggage to what constitutes a news source without ‘a particular point of view.’ To a conservative Fox News viewer, the network may well meet its former stated standard of ‘fair and balanced’; a liberal Guardian reader may view its editorial stance as simple common sense.”
Though you can sense them edging towards an alternative framework.
The DNR notes, “Overall, news avoidance has not changed in 2026 and is essentially flat at 42% year-on-year (for reference, the figure stood at 29% in 2017 when we began measuring it).”
As I finished writing this, I came across comments from Jim Egan, the lead author for the study. Really worth reading and it addresses some of the issues I speak about here. For instance, “In many cases, Egan told Digital Content Next, that means that creator content is supplementing – rather than replacing – news consumption from more traditional brands. ‘The use of news creators is something that’s complementary and additive,’ he observes. ‘It doesn’t seem to be coming at the expense of usage of traditional publishers.’”
Thank you, I feel spoilt by this kind of article and commentary, it cuts through so well. And really starkly exposes the limited insightfulness provided by so many mainstream journalists, including those seen wandering around a certain Ball cosying up with politicians.
This gets me thinking about the labels themselves. “Refugee journalists” might be especially useful, because it captures people pushed out of institutions who are still reporting, investigating and trying to hold power to account, often on their own dollar and without a corporate masthead (complete with lawyers) standing behind them.
That seems to strengthen your broader point about hybridity. The old categories are breaking down, and some of that is genuinely democratic. Good journalism can now survive outside institutions that no longer want to fund it, protect it or sometimes even tolerate it.
The difficulty is that the same fracture also gives organised political operations room to present themselves as just another voice in the ecosystem. A journalist with a newsletter and a billionaire-backed political network might both be called “creators”, but they aren’t doing remotely the same thing. One is trying to produce journalism. The other may be trying to manufacture consent, seed talking points or make coordinated influence look like spontaneous public opinion.
I wonder whether the next useful distinction is less mainstream versus independent, and more about money, infrastructure and power. Who’s reporting? Who’s organising? Who’s paying for the reach? Who gets amplified by the platforms? And who gets mistaken for an ordinary bloke with a microphone once the machinery disappears behind the feed?