Women are increasingly away from the news, social media outweighs web-based news, and Australians are less wary of news created with AI. These are key trends in the University of Canberra's 2025 digital news report.
This report is the 11th annual edition, and continues to observe long-established movements. Some of the most important trends have been linked to the growing contradiction between men and women regarding news and the trends of young people to source news from social media.
The report is an Australian global series by the UK Reuters Institute, which surveys around 2,000 people in each of its 48 target markets around the world. In the Australian version, representative people from 2006 were surveyed by YouGov online panel (over 500,000 people).
When it comes to global rankings, Australians have taken a lot of measures to assess somewhere in the middle of the pack. For example, when it comes to intense news users, Australians (53%) are below the global average of 59%, but tend to trust slightly more news than the global average (43% vs. 39%).
advertisement
Australians stand out in terms of concerns about misinformation online (74%, highest of all reported countries), and willingness to pay for reported news podcasts (Furthermore, one of the 20 countries surveyed.) And with the gender gap among intense news users.
Heavy News Users by Demographics (DNR 2025, click to enlarge)
Heavy news users are defined as those who access the news more than once a day. In Australia, 67% of men report intense news use, but only 44% of women fall into this category. This 23% gap is the widest report has recorded in the past four years. This statistic is part of a pattern that is likely to turn off news due to women with low news trust scores, increased social media usage for news, and its negative emotional impact.
“The news consumption gap continues to grow between men and women in Australia,” the report said. “44% of women visit news at least once a day, which is 23 percentage points lower than men. They are also much less likely to use new forms of news, such as podcasts and AI chatbots.
This asymmetry between men and women is also seen in attitudes towards AI use in both news production and consumption. The report found that 28% of men are primarily AI-produced news, twice as many women, and quite a few men (8% vs. 5%) have been seeking news from AI chatbots this past week.
The main author of the report Sorapark
This comfort with News' AI has increased completely since the 2024 survey, but the majority of those surveyed generally still refused to engage with AI. The exception to AI Warness is seen in the age of 35, with the majority satisfied with news created by humans, primarily with the help of AI.
For the first time since the report began, social media surpassed online news as the main source of news, after a sharp decline in online news usage (down from 28% in 2024 to 23% this year). Television remained stable as the most popular and major source of news (37%), fulfilling other demographic experiences.
