“Alarm bells are ringing in my brain” - Our Digital News Report India launch panel on low trust and shifts in news habits

A summary of a conversation with Indian newsroom leaders Dhanya Rajendran, Pradeep Gairola, and Sannuta Raghu. How can Indian news organisations adapt to a shifting media landscape? Panellists at the India launch of the Digital News Report 2026 addressed this key question in a recorded discussion following a presentation of the report’s findings by lead author Jim Egan. Dhanya Rajendran , editor-in-chief of The News Minute , Pradeep Gairola of The Hindu Group , and Sannuta Raghu of Scroll joined Mitali Mukherjee to discuss what this shift means for newsrooms of very different scales. The event was held in partnership with Indian independent media organisation Newslaundry . The Digital News Report 2026 found 39% of Indian respondents trust most news most of the time, a proportion close to the global average of 37%, the lowest in 11 years. Our Indian survey also found 58% of people expressing concern about fake news and misinformation online. Our Indian sample showed proportions higher than the global average for news podcast use - 17% when compared to 11% overall - and for the use of chatbots for news - 22% when compared to 10% globally. In response to the report’s findings, some panellists were concerned about data points like the decrease in trust. “What I was taken aback by is the lack of trust that people have in the media: though it's not surprising to see that the trust is going down further, alarm bells are ringing in my brain as to how we salvage the situation,” Dhanya Rajendran said. While the Digital News Report strives to be broadly representative of the countries it surveys, it’s important to note that this is not the case for India. Our findings for the Indian market are based on a survey of mainly English-speaking, online news users – a small subset of a larger, more diverse media market in a country with 780 languages. Findings in this online poll are not nationally representative and will tend to under-represent the continued importance of traditional media such as TV and print, the Digital News Report authors note . Watch the video Audiences (and some news outlets) are drifting towards platforms Since last year, social platforms as sources of news have taken off in our Indian survey sample, after five years of being slightly above but fairly similar to the proportion that uses TV for news. Of social platforms, YouTube is the most used for news, closely followed by WhatsApp. Both platforms are very popular in their own right, with large majorities among our sample using them for any purpose. At the same time, Google is becoming less reliable as a source of traffic to news websites. For the News Minute, the problem is reduced discoverability, Dhanya Rajendran said. The solution for her outlet has been to shift towards video content, but in doing so you enter into competition with influencers and creators. The News Minute currently has 750,000 YouTube subscribers. Even as audiences move away from traditional media and towards platforms such as YouTube, many Indian media outlets aren’t making the most of this shift, said Rajendran. This is because smaller operations like The News Minute may not have the staff needed to produce lots of videos, but also because sometimes content produced following journalistic principles can’t compete with creator videos on the same topic. “There is a language which a journalism platform can employ versus a language that a content creator can use, and many times we don't want to cross certain lines, which is why I would say our videos can sometimes be boring,” Rajendran explained. Another risk of adapting too much to social media is that it could end up failing to tempt users off of the platform and onto your website. Rajendran mentioned seeing “a boom of carousels” on X and Instagram in which news outlets explain a whole article through text on slides, taking away the incentive of clicking through to the website to learn more. “I… Read more