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%).
Australians stand out in terms of concern about misinformation online (74%, the highest of all reported nations), a reported willingness to pay for news podcasts (also number 1 of 20 nations surveyed) and in the gender gap among heavy news users.
Heavy news users by demographic (DNR 2025, click to enlarge)
Heavy news users are defined as those who access news more than once a day. In Australia, 67% of men report heavy news use, while only 44% of women fall into this category. That 23% gap is the widest the report has recorded over the past four years. The stat is part of a pattern that sees women with lower news trust scores, higher use of social media for news and a higher likelihood of switching off news because of its negative emotional impact.
“The gap in news consumption continues to widen between Australian men and women,” the report states. “While 44% of women access news more than once a day, this is 23 percentage points lower than men. They also much less likely to use newer forms of news, such as podcasts and AI chatbots. Women are lighter consumers of news across all platforms except social media.”
The report’s lead author Sora Park told Mumbrella mainstream news organisations had not been able to provide news that appeals to female audiences.
“In the meantime, there are quite a few alternative outlets that provide a diverse range of news. The Digital News Report only tracks mainstream news, so it is hard to know where audiences are going for alternative news sources but if mainstream news do not keep up and shift their reporting to embrace marginalised audiences, they will quickly lose them,” she said. “I think it’s a real wake up call for news outlets to pay attention to what women want, especially young women.”
This asymmetry between men and women is also seen in attitudes to AI use in both news production and consumption. The report found 28% of men were comfortable with news produced mainly with AI, double the number of women, and that considerably more men (8% versus 5%) had asked an AI chatbot for news in the past week.
The report’s lead author Sora Park
While this comfort with AI in news was growing across the board from the 2024 survey, a majority of those surveyed were in general still rejected AI involvement in news. The exception to AI wariness was seen with under 35s, a majority of whom are comfortable with news produced mainly by humans with the assistance of AI.
For the first time since the report began, social media surpassed online news as a main source of news, after online news use dropped sharply (down from 28% in 2024 to 23% this year). TV remains steady as the most popular main source of news (37%), and other demographic expecations were met: young people overwhelming favour social media, old people like TV.
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topics
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Digital News Report
DNR
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Reuters Institute Digital News Report
Sora Park
University of Canberra
A news gender gap? Come on now, let’s reel this back a little.
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