Social Is Now the Main News Source. Post Like It.

More people now get news from social and video platforms than from television or from news organisations’ own websites.

That is the headline finding of the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2026, and it is the first time it has been true at a global level.

For a brand, the consequence is not that you should start posting about the news. It is that the feed has become the place people go to find out what is happening, so your posts are being judged in that room. Not against the last brand post someone saw. Against the news, the creators, and whatever else the reader opened the app for.

That is a publisher standard. It is higher than the one most brand feeds are built to meet.

What the report actually found

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism published its Digital News Report 2026 on 16 June. It runs on a total sample of 97,520 people across 48 markets, with fieldwork carried out by YouGov from the middle of January to the end of February.

Averaged across those markets, 54% of respondents had used social media and video networks as a source of news in the past week. Television came in at 52%. News organisations’ own websites and apps came in at 51%.

That is the first time platforms have topped that table globally. Use of TV news and of publisher-owned sites has fallen by 13 and 12 percentage points respectively since 2020.

Read the finding properly before you act on it

Those three numbers sit within three points of each other. This is not the collapse of television, and the report’s own language is a drift rather than a shift.

It is also an average across 48 markets, not a description of any single one. Plenty of markets still lean heavily on broadcast, and a channel plan built on a global average will be wrong in specific places.

The survey covers online news consumers, so it describes how people who are already online behave rather than the whole population.

None of that softens the point. The direction has been consistent for years, and the crossover has now happened.

Your feed is competing with the news now

If more than half of people use platforms to find out what is going on, the feed is a news surface. Your post is not being weighed against the last brand post someone scrolled past. It is being weighed against everything else on the screen on a day when something is happening.

The rest of the report says the same thing from other angles. 77% of respondents now watch online news video each week. Almost half, 46%, get some news from creators of any type, and 27% from creators who focus on news specifically. Among people aged 18 to 24, 52% say social media, video networks and AI chatbots are their main way of getting news.

That is the competitive set. Publishers have understood it for years, which is why always-on social looks the way it does.

Trust is the other half of the story

The same report puts trust in news at 37%, the lowest level it has recorded since it started measuring in 2015. Trust fell in 29 of the 48 markets. Around 42% of people say they avoid the news sometimes or often.

Read the two findings together and the instruction gets clearer. People have moved to the feed for information, and they are more sceptical about what they find there.

That is not an argument for posting less. It is an argument for being the account worth believing. Where trust is scarce, a feed that is consistent, specific and willing to stand behind what it says is worth far more than a feed that is simply busy.

What a publisher standard actually means

A publisher standard is not a tone of voice. It is a set of operating commitments a newsroom takes for granted and most brand feeds have never had to make.

• Speed. A decision to publish takes hours, not a fortnight of approvals.
• An editorial line. The account has a view, and people can predict what it will and will not say.
• A reason to exist, per post. Every item leaves the reader knowing something they did not know.
• Cadence. It publishes on a rhythm the audience can feel, campaign or no campaign.
• Accountability. When it gets something wrong, it says so in the same place it said the original thing.

Those five are the bar. Almost every brand feed fails on at least two of them, and usually the first two.

Speed is the first thing that breaks

Most brands do not have a content problem here. They have a decision problem. The idea exists on the day it is relevant and lands three weeks later, by which point it is a post about something nobody is thinking about any more.

Publishers solve that with decision rights rather than heroics. One person owns the call. The categories that genuinely need legal or leadership sign off are named in advance. Everything outside those categories ships.

If your approvals cannot clear a post inside a day, you cannot hold a publisher standard, whatever the calendar says. That constraint is the first thing we look at when we take on day-to-day social media management.

An editorial line, not just a content calendar

A calendar tells you when you are posting. An editorial line tells you what you are for.

Publishers can state theirs in a sentence: this account covers this subject for these people, and it holds this position. That is why a regular reader can guess what the account would say about a story before it says it, and why they come back to check.

Most brand calendars are a list of dates with formats attached. There is no view inside them, so nothing is memorable and nothing is missed when it stops.

Write the line down in one sentence, then use it to reject ideas. A line that rejects nothing is not a line.

Make every post worth knowing

The test a newsroom applies is blunt. What does the reader know now that they did not know before they saw this?

Applied honestly, that test kills a lot of brand output. The office photo with no story in it. The awareness day nobody asked about. The quote card with a sentiment on it.

It does not mean every post has to be hard news. A demonstration, a real number, an explanation of a decision, a straight answer to the question customers keep asking, all pass comfortably. What fails is the post that exists because the slot existed.

Run that test at the briefing stage, not in the edit. By the time something is made, nobody wants to hear it.

Be accountable in public

Accountability is the cheapest trust signal available, and it is the one brands avoid hardest.

In practice it means naming who is behind the account, correcting an error in the place you made it rather than quietly deleting, sourcing a claim when you make one, and answering the awkward comment instead of hiding it.

Deleting costs you twice. You lose the correction, and the people who saw the original still remember it.

In a year when trust in news sits at its lowest recorded level, an account that shows its working is doing something most of the feed is not.

What to stop doing

• Stop treating the content calendar as the strategy. It is a scheduling artefact, not a point of view.
• Stop routing every post through the same approval chain. Sort by risk, not by habit.
• Stop posting to fill slots. An empty slot costs less than a forgettable post.
• Stop reacting to news stories you have nothing to say about. Commentary without a line reads as opportunism, and audiences are primed to spot it.
• Stop benchmarking your feed against competitors’ feeds. Benchmark it against what else is on the reader’s screen.

What good looks like

A feed that meets this standard is recognisable inside three posts. You know what it covers, you know its position, and you can tell it was made by people who were paying attention that week.

Operationally it is unglamorous. A small number of repeatable formats. One named owner per platform. An approval path with a stated turnaround time. A weekly review that reads retention, saves and shares rather than follower counts, and changes something as a result.

It does not look like more output. Most feeds that reach this standard publish less than they used to and land more often.

How NBK thinks about the publisher standard

Our team came out of publishing: UNILAD, LADbible Group, SPORF, Social Chain, Supercar Blondie. Those environments teach one lesson above all the others, which is that the system decides the output. Talent without a system produces a good post occasionally. The scale we work at now, more than 600 million views a month, runs on process rather than inspiration.

So we treat a brand feed as an operating problem before a creative one. Who decides, how quickly, against what standard, measured how. That is the same discipline behind running social media like a system, applied to a surface that now doubles as where people get their news.

The report is simply the evidence. The bar the audience applies was already there.

Next step

If your feed is busy but nobody in the business could describe what it stands for, the problem sits upstream of the content.

Start with the system behind it: the line, the decision rights, the turnaround, the weekly review. If you want that looked at properly, NBK can help find the constraint and rebuild the workflow around it.