In recent years, the ways in which people encounter and consume news have become increasingly diverse (Newman et al. 2025; Schneiders 2024). Sources once synonymous with news, like print and TV, are losing engagement and their dominance over the public agenda, as audiences, especially younger ones, are turning more and more to digital platforms to stay informed (Egan et al. 2026). Social and video networks such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok now make up a significant share of global news consumption, while newer formats such as vertical video and podcasts are gaining ground.

In digital environments, news produced by traditional media is only a small fraction of the vast array of content people encounter and spend time on (Fletcher et al. 2020; Lazer et al. 2026). Rather than appearing in dedicated spaces like newspapers or news bulletins, on digital platforms news is often presented in largely undifferentiated feeds alongside entertainment, lifestyle, and personal content, among many others. What’s more, public figures, ranging from politicians to celebrities, whose communication with the public was once mediated by traditional media, now speak to their followers directly. Ordinary people can document and disseminate images of significant events like earthquakes or police brutality, while influencers play a growing role in shaping political conversations and public opinion. Meanwhile, formats and genres previously constrained by material affordances and institutional norms have become drastically more fluid and multimodal.

As Edgerly and Vraga (2020) argue, these developments have unsettled existing assumptions about what news is, what it looks like, who provides it, and where to find it. Prior research on ‘news values’, for example, has examined what characteristics make events or topics worthy of news coverage and how this has changed over time, primarily based on analyses of news content (Galtung and Ruge 1965; Harcup and O’Neill 2017) or of journalists’ reasoning and sensemaking (Schultz 2007; Caple and Bednarek 2016). However, we know comparatively little about how audiences think about news values (Temmerman and Mast 2020) or about how they understand and define news more generally (but see Eddy et al. 2025), including how they distinguish it from other forms of media content in practice – especially across different national contexts. This has important implications for how news organisations think about what lies at the very heart of their business, as well as for researchers, whose understanding of news consumption depends in part on how audiences themselves define what counts as news in the first place.

This report brings audience understandings of ‘news-ness’ (Edgerly and Vraga 2020) to the forefront. We explore how people define news using a comparative, multi-method approach: first with media diaries and in-depth interviews, and second with complementary nationally representative online surveys. On top of the foundational belief that news should be based on accurate and verified information, our analysis has identified five observable attributes in people’s definitions of news, and how they can be shaped by the relevance, time, and place of events.

Read the full article about changing definitions of news by Dr. Tali Aharoni, Dr. Waqas Ejaz, Dr. Amy Ross Arguedas, and Dr. Richard Fletcher at Reuters Institute for the Study Journalism.