How the Evolving News Economy Is Reshaping Investor Trust

The Reuters Institute's Digital News Report 2026 was published last week, and most of the commentary around it has focused on what it means for publishers and platforms. But, I want to look at it from a different perspective, the consumer of news and how the changing landscape has influenced how their opinions are shaped, because fifteen-years today’s media and content media landscape still shapes reputations. And this still impacts how investors and technology companies are perceived.

Here is my read on it, not a summary of it. Reputation used to be manageable because it moved through a small number of known channels: a handful of broadcasters, newspapers, and later, owned websites. You could brief them, monitor them, and, if something went wrong, correct the record through them. And on occasions, deploy your legal counsel if you felt that your reputation was brought to question by an untruth. That world is gone. What has replaced it is a landscape assembled from social platforms, video networks, individual creators, and, today, AI systems that render verdicts on credibility without ever sending anyone back to the source. For investors, whether that is a sovereign fund weighing a market entry, a CVC backing a founder who will be scrutinised in public, or a single family office protecting a name built over generations, this is not a media trend to note in passing. It is a change in where reputational risk now sits, and it needs to be priced accordingly.

Below are the signals from this year's report that stand out for me, and, more usefully, what I think they demand of anyone whose capital depends on how they, or their portfolio, are perceived.

Signal one: the audience has left the buildings you monitor

For the first time in the report's history, social media and video networks (54% weekly use across 48 markets) have overtaken both television (52%) and news organisations' own websites and apps (51%) as the world's most used source of news. The findings say that this is a drift rather than a shift, and that is the right word for it. Nobody rejected journalism outright. Usage of owned news properties and television has each fallen by roughly 12 to 13 percentage points since 2020, quietly and steadily, while platforms absorbed the difference.

The reason this matters more than the headline number suggests is what it does to reputational monitoring. Most due diligence processes, communications functions, and crisis playbooks were built on the assumption that ‘the media’ is a stable, identifiable set of institutions. Track the coverage, manage the relationships, and you have managed the risk. That assumption is now false in a specific and measurable way: the conversation that shapes how a fund, a founder, or a government is perceived is happening substantially outside the institutions anyone is set up to monitor. If your reputational risk framework still treats media monitoring as equivalent to reputation management, it is measuring the wrong thing. And this is an issue for the wider public relations sector, as well as for in-house communications practitioners whose job is to brief leadership and boards on what ‘the media’ is saying about them.

Signal two: video and platforms are where reputations are made, not just reported

The video data in this year's report is, to me, the more revealing story than the headline platform numbers. Weekly online news video consumption now sits at 77% across all 48 markets, and in 45 of them, more people watch news online than watch it on broadcast television. The growth sits almost entirely on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube rather than on publishers' own sites, and it is concentrated in exactly the markets I spend most of my time in: Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and parts of Africa, where countries like Thailand, Indonesia, and South Africa show weekly online video use above 80%.

I think this is being misread by a lot of institutional investors as an entertainment story. It is not. It is a distribution story. In fast-growing, platform-native markets across the Gulf's near neighbours, Southeast Asia, and Japan, the reputational narrative around inward investment, national reform, or a company's social licence to operate is being assembled by creators and algorithms, not by press offices. Equally, legacy media outlets have historically followed journalism protocols before reporting. For influencers, challenging the past is part of the appeal.

Over half of 18 to 24 year olds globally now say platforms and AI are their main source of news, 32 percentage points ahead of anything else. That cohort will be running writting policy, managing funds, and companies your capital depends on within a decade. If your market entry or soft power strategy is still built around traditional media relations imported from a different era, you are building on a channel that a majority of your future stakeholders currently barely use.

Signal three: AI chatbots are becoming verdict-renderers, and that changes where the risk lives

This is the signal I would put in front of any investment committee today. Weekly use of AI chatbots for news has grown from 7% to 10% globally in twelve months, doubling in several international markets. That is still a minority behaviour. What should concern investors is not the scale of use but its nature: 42% of chatbot users say they use the tool to ask follow-up questions - context, and, more tellingly, around a third report using it to evaluate whether a source is reliable in the first place. The chatbot is not just fetching information any more. It is passing judgement on credibility.

Then look at what happens after that judgement is passed. Across the platforms tracked, only 4% of AI chatbot users say they regularly click through to an original source, compared with 19% for search and 17% for social media. For most users, in practice, the chatbot's answer about you is the only answer they will ever see. There is no equivalent of a right of reply built into that experience, and no press office briefing that reaches it directly. Think about it, people are using AI for news, which is presented to them from sources that a user might not click through to check if it can be trusted. This is where the battle to safeguard critical-thinking will be lost, or won.

I would frame this as a genuinely new category of reputational and misinformation risk, closer in kind to a cyber exposure than a traditional media risk. It sits upstream, in training data and retrieval layers rather than in a specific article or broadcast segment, which makes it harder to detect and slower to correct. An investor doing diligence on a target, or a government courting capital, needs to know what the leading AI systems already say about them, because that answer is increasingly the first, and sometimes the only, impression a counterparty forms. Generative engine optimisation (GEO), treating your presence in AI-generated answers with the same discipline that search and social earned a decade ago, is no longer a nice-to-have. It is closer to a fiduciary consideration.

Signal four: the public still wants impartial news, but the economics reward the opposite

Here the data cuts against the popular narrative, and it is worth investors understanding why, because the nuance is where the real risk sits. Across all markets, 45% of respondents say they prefer news from sources without a particular point of view, more than double the 22% who prefer news that shares their own opinion, and that preference has barely moved since 2020. If you assumed the public had simply given up on balance, the data says otherwise.

But the minority who want partisan content are disproportionately vocal, engaged, and commercially valuable to publishers and creators. They comment more, share more, and pay more. That creates a structural incentive to serve the loud minority even while the quiet majority says it wants the opposite, and it is the same dynamic that has pushed 27% of respondents to now get some news from individual creators, even though those same audiences consistently rate creators as less trustworthy and less impartial than mainstream outlets. People are not being fooled. They are making an entertainment trade-off with their eyes open, and the institutions that used to hold the centre are losing ground to it regardless.

For investors and those working in the building and protecting of reputations and confidence, this matters because it means misinformation and polarised narratives are not fringe phenomena that a good comms function can simply out-shout. They are structurally advantaged by the attention economy that platforms run on. A quiet majority preferring accuracy does not protect you from a loud minority setting the terms of the conversation about your investment, your market, or your governance record. Reputational defence built on the assumption that facts win by default is building on an assumption the data no longer supports.

Signal five: trust is not just falling, it is retreating inward

Read the Reuters findings against the Edelman Trust Barometer, published in January this year, and a sharper picture emerges. Reuters shows trust in news has fallen to its lowest recorded level since tracking began in 2015, down in 29 of 48 markets. Edelman's 2026 findings explain a good part of why: seven in ten respondents globally are now unwilling or hesitant to trust someone with different values or information sources, a pattern Edelman calls ‘insularity,’ and it is strongest in developed markets including Japan and Germany. Trust in national governments and major news organisations has fallen sharply over the past five years, while trust in neighbours, colleagues, and one's own employer has risen. The trust gap between high and low income groups has more than doubled since 2012.

The pattern across both reports is the same: people are not simply trusting institutions less, they are retreating into smaller, more personal circles and building their view of you from inside those circles rather than from broadcast or print. That has a direct implication for how reputation gets built now. Scale and reach, the traditional currency of a media strategy, matter less than they did. Proximity, relationship, and being vouched for by someone already trusted matter more. This is precisely why individual creators, however partisan or informal, are outperforming institutions on trust metrics with younger and more sceptical audiences. They are inside the circle. Most institutional communications functions are still operating as if they are outside it, broadcasting in.

Signal six: even where institutions still command trust, that trust is politically split

One more data point from this year's report deserves attention before turning to what investors should do about all this. Across the 26 markets where public service media still play a significant role, people on balance think it has a positive effect on national life (37% positive against 22% negative). But that aggregate hides a sharper reality: in the US, Germany, Spain, the UK, and elsewhere, there are very large gaps between how people on the political left and right rate the same institutions. The same broadcaster or outlet can be seen as a stabilising national asset by one half of the electorate and as a discredited actor by the other.

This is the clearest evidence yet that reputational risk is no longer a single number you can manage towards. It is increasingly bifurcated by audience, and a strategy built to satisfy the aggregate view will often satisfy neither side particularly well. For an investor entering a politically contested market, whether that is a national infrastructure fund, a defence-adjacent technology company, or a sovereign entity investing into a foreign jurisdiction, this means your reputational strategy has to account for at least two audiences with genuinely different starting assumptions about your legitimacy, not one blended public.

What this means for how investors and leaders should act

None of this is an argument for retreating from public communications. Anything but that, and it is certainly not an argument for ignoring misinformation risk because ‘the data is nuanced.’ All this is an argument for redesigning your whole communications and engagement discipline around four shifts that boards of enterprise organisations and start-ups. Investors and governments need to act on it.

First, treat reputational discovery as seriously as financial or legal due diligence. Before you can manage perception, you need to know where it is actually being formed, which creators, platforms, and AI systems are shaping and influencing the narrative around you, your target market or portfolio company, rather than assuming it is still the trade press or the national broadsheet. This is discovery work, not communications output, and it needs to happen before capital is committed, not after a crisis.

Second, build direct presence in the channels where trust is actually being extended now: platform-native content, credible creators, and accurate representation inside AI-generated answers. This is particularly urgent in the fast-growing corridors, Japan, the Gulf's neighbouring markets, Southeast Asia, and Southern Europe, where the audience that will decide your social licence to operate is already platform-native and, in many cases, has never encountered you through a traditional outlet at all.

Third, recognise misinformation and narrative risk as a category that sits alongside cyber and regulatory risk in your governance framework, not underneath a generic ‘communications’ line item. The mechanics of this year's data, low click-through from AI answers, structural incentives favouring the partisan minority, and rising insularity among the public, all point the same way: the correction cycle that used to protect institutions from bad information has weakened, and the cost of being misrepresented in the systems people now trust is higher, not lower, than it was five years ago.

Fourth, stop designing reputational strategy for a single, blended public. If institutional trust is genuinely bifurcated along political lines, as the public service media data suggests, a strategy that only tests well with an aggregate audience is quietly failing with at least one half of the stakeholders who matter. This means building in enough discovery to understand where the fault lines run in a given market, and being deliberate about how a narrative lands on each side of them, rather than assuming one carefully worded statement will do the job for everyone.

The organisations that treat reputation as strategic capital rather than a communications expense, and that do the discovery work to understand where that capital is actually being built or eroded, will be the ones who compound the advantage this shift creates. The ones who keep monitoring the institutions this year's data shows people are leaving will simply be reading yesterday's newspaper, more slowly than everyone else.