“Impartiality and personality are not opposites” – Our Digital News Report US launch panel on tackling the coming changes

A summary of a conversation with Mukul Devichand, Swati Sharma, Sally Buzbee, Miki Toliver King and Ryan Merkley With trust in news at a record low, what are news publishers in the United States doing to compete with alternative voices and engage audiences on their own terms? This was the question at the heart of the US launch of the Digital News Report, who took place at Reuters New York headquarters on Thursday 18 June. Introduced by Reuters managing director Alphonse Hardel , the event featured a presentation by the report’s lead author Jim Egan, followed by a discussion moderated by the Institute's director, Mitali Mukherjee. The panel featured Mukul Devichand , editor of AI initiatives at The New York Times ; Swati Sharma , editor-in-chief of Vox; Sally Buzbee , news editor for the US and Canada at Reuters: Miki Toliver King , managing director of news partnerships for North America at Google; and Ryan Merkley , chief operating officer at NPR. Here’s a summary of the event. Watch the launch .embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; } 1. A desire for connection Some of the changes highlighted in the report, such as high levels of news avoidance among young people and growing attention for news creators, point to “a desire to feel connection and a call for content,” said NPR’s Merkley. This feeling was echoed by Buzbee, who pointed to Reuters experiments with video explainers on complicated topics such as Taiwan and said it’s reassuring to know that behind changes in format preferences, audiences are still seeking out news. “It is so heartening that people, at a minimum, are still saying that they're looking for good information, that is a hopeful signal,” Buzbee said. “But are we standing in our own way, are we doing things the wrong way?” She stressed that news publishers have to respond with innovative formats, even if they might look like small steps in comparison with the overarching changes to the information ecosystem. Responding to audiences’ need for local news, for example, is an important way to reconnect with audiences and build closer relationships with them. In the case of NPR, which provides both national-level news coverage and manages a large network of local radio stations, this takes the shape of using audience data to integrate stories local to people in their app and website experience. “Part of NPR’s secret sauce is that connection to community and its ability to tell a humane and contextualised story that feels like it meets you where you are,” Merkley said. “We are in a human minority-internet right now. That's the place we're moving to. We need to be curious and experimental about new ways to build connections with the audience, and to listen to what folks are telling us. They want to have that connection. They want trust. They're looking for context.” 2. The shift to platforms The Digital News Report 2026 exposed an important milestone. For the first time since we started measuring, social media and video networks are, on average across the 48 markets covered, more popular than both TV and publishers’ news websites and apps as news sources. This means that audiences now have a more incidental relationship with news, coming across it while looking at other content in one of these networks. As the chart below shows, the difference is even higher in the United States, where 56% of our respondents use social media for news, much more than TV and news websites (both at 45%). … Read more