UK news audiences look beyond the platform feed

Where a story is found is not who reported it

A news story discovered on a social platform may still have been reported by a broadcaster or newspaper. That distinction matters when considering Britain’s changing news habits: the route into a story and the organisation behind it are not the same thing.^[1][3]

Ofcom’s September report says 73% of UK adults accessed news through online intermediaries in the past month, while 57% went directly to publishers’ websites or apps. The intermediary category includes social media, video-sharing platforms, search engines, aggregators and AI tools. People can use several routes, so the figures are not competing shares of a single total.^[1]

Only 5% used intermediaries alone, and 2% relied solely on social media. Ofcom also found that established broadcasters’ journalism reached people through social and video platforms. A shift towards platform distribution therefore does not establish that audiences have stopped encountering traditional publishers.^[1][2]

Trust in news and trust in a brand diverge

The Reuters Institute’s UK country analysis, published in June, reports overall trust in news at 30%, five percentage points below 2025. It also says trust in individual brands changed little. Those are different questions: an audience can have a more negative view of news in general without changing its assessment of every familiar outlet.^[3]

These findings cannot show that platforms caused the fall in trust. They come from separate surveys with different questions and methods. The Reuters Institute’s research was conducted online by YouGov from mid-January to late February 2026, using quotas and weighting. Its methodology treats the results primarily as a picture of online populations and cautions that reported habits do not always match actual behaviour.^[3][4]

The measurement changed too

Ofcom’s 2026 research explains that its survey approach was revised in 2025 to capture incidental encounters with news, use a past-month reference period and collect responses continuously across the year. It warns against treating comparisons with earlier years as straightforward changes in audience behaviour. These are UK-wide findings, not England-only estimates.^[2]

For publishers, the distinction to follow is between reach and a direct relationship with readers. Appearing in a platform feed can extend distribution without establishing that someone recognises the publisher, returns to its website or pays for its work. Neither survey establishes how those steps translate into revenue for an individual news site.^[1][3][4]