Trust in the news is at its lowest point since researchers began tracking it more than a decade ago, and Gen Z is at the centre of that shift. According to the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2026, based on nearly 100,000 interviews across 48 countries, global trust in news has fallen to 37%, the lowest figure recorded since the study began in 2015. Trust fell in 29 of the 48 markets surveyed this year.
For Gen Z specifically, the picture is less about outright rejection and more about a quiet, structural drift away from the outlets that shaped their parents’ understanding of the world. More than half of 18 to 24 year olds surveyed globally now name social media, video networks or AI chatbots as their main source of news, according to the same report. And the habit looks permanent rather than transitional. Fifty-six per cent of 18 to 24 year olds say they have never regularly read a newspaper, leading the report’s authors to conclude there is little reason to expect this generation will simply grow into older news habits as they age.
A fragmented, rather than an empty, information diet
It would be a mistake to read this as Gen Z simply switching off from news altogether. A 2026 survey of 1,000 young American adults by the research platform Attest found that 44% access news daily via social media.
What has changed is not whether Gen Z consumes news but how it decides what to believe. As one analysis of the generation’s habits put it, a young reader might trust a traditional outlet for original reporting, a creator for translation of that reporting, a subreddit for community reaction and a group chat for emotional context, all for the same story. That is a fundamentally different relationship with journalism than reading one newspaper front to back, and it means credibility is now assembled from several sources rather than granted wholesale to a single masthead.
This scepticism extends to brands and institutions too. A 2026 study by Walr, conducted for We Are Talker, found that 72% of Gen Z trust customer reviews when judging whether a brand or organisation is credible, ahead of independent research and expert opinion (68% each) and traditional news articles, which trailed at 58%. The consistent theme across these findings is a preference for perceived independent validation over anything that looks institutional or promotional, whether that institution is a corporation or a newsroom.
Why the trust has eroded
Several forces are cited repeatedly by researchers. The Reuters Institute points to political instability, divisive elections and direct attacks on outlets and individual journalists as drivers of the sharpest declines, noting that a noisier, more fragmented information environment tends to coincide with falling trust. There is also a generational sense that legacy media moves too slowly and speaks in a tone that feels distant or corporate, compared with the immediacy of a creator explaining a story straight to camera.
Ironically, even as trust in news falls, support for the underlying principles of journalism has not disappeared. The Reuters Institute’s report notes that audiences still cite impartiality and independence as core values that are necessary for society, even while expressing dissatisfaction with the news experience they are actually getting. In other words, Gen Z has not abandoned the idea of trustworthy journalism; it has grown sceptical that mainstream outlets are still delivering it.
How new-age news platforms are capitalising
Into that gap has stepped a new generation of platforms built on a different premise… that trust is personal and chosen rather than institutional and assumed.
Substack is the clearest example. What began in 2017 as a simple newsletter tool has grown into a platform its own materials describe as having more than five million paid subscriptions, spanning newsletters, podcasts, video and live formats. Its appeal to younger readers rests on the fact that subscriptions are opt-in and curated by the reader rather than served up by an opaque recommendation algorithm. There is no endless feed optimised for outrage, only writers a reader has actively chosen to follow.
Meanwhile, individual creators on YouTube, new-age news websites and Instagram continue to occupy the space once held by evening news anchors, translating and reacting to events for audiences who want context delivered by a recognisable, relatable voice rather than an institution.
Crucially, researchers stress this is additive rather than a wholesale replacement of journalism. WAN-IFRA’s summary of the Reuters Institute findings notes that creators and influencers are, for most audiences, a complement to traditional news coverage rather than a substitute for it. The traditional reporting still gets done. What has changed is who gets to interpret it first, and who Gen Z trusts to tell them what it means.
A note on AI
One challenger has so far failed to win the trust it might have expected. Weekly use of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini for news rose only modestly, from 7% to 10% globally year on year, and just 1% of respondents to the Reuters Institute survey name AI as their main news source. Trust in AI-generated answers sits at 20% globally, well below trust in news overall. A separate Attest survey found that 72% of Gen Z respondents hold negative or cautious views of AI-generated content, suggesting that even a generation comfortable getting news from Insta clips and Substack newsletters remains wary of handing that judgement over to a machine.
The bottom line
Gen Z has not lost faith in journalism as an idea. It has lost faith in the institutions that once had a monopoly on delivering it, and it is redistributing that trust across creators, newsletters and communities it can evaluate for itself. For mainstream outlets, the challenge is no longer simply publishing the news. It is proving, story by story, that they still deserve to be part of the mix a young reader assembles before deciding what to believe.