Gender news gap widens, Australia warms to AI news: Digital News Report 2025

Women are increasingly moving away from news, social media surpasses web-based news and Australians are becoming less wary of news produced with AI: these are the major trends in the University of Canberra’s 2025 Digital News Report.

The report, in its 11th annual edition, continues the observation of well-established movements over years. Some of the most significant trends involve the expanding discrepancy between men and women when it comes to news and the tendency of young people to source news from social media.

The report is the Australian version of the global series by the Reuters Institute in the UK, which surveys around 2000 people in each of the 48 target markets worldwide. For the Australian version, a representative 2006 people were surveyed from the YouGov online panel (of over half a million people).

In terms of global standings, Australians rate somewhere around the middle of the pack on many measures. For example, in terms of heavy news users, Australians (53%) are below the global average of 59%, while we tend to trust news slightly more than the global average (43% versus the average of 39%).