Joy Jenkins co-authors U.S. page of 2025 Reuters Digital News Report
Joy Jenkins, an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, has co-authored the U.S. page of the 2025 Reuters Digital News Report, the 14th edition of the influential report since its inception in 2012.
The report is based on an annual survey conducted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford that tracks news consumption trends in countries all over the world. Jenkins and her co-author, Professor Lucas Graves at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, positioned the survey results in the context of the sustained erosion of public trust in news, highlight the crisis in funding for public media and observe a gradual but continued audience shift away from print and television news in favor of social media platforms and influencers.
“Joy’s contributions to this report help provide important context for news leaders who need to know how audiences use the news,” said David Kurpius, dean of the School of Journalism. “As changes occur over time, anyone can compare this year’s report to one from 10 years ago and understand not only where we are today, but how we got here. It’s difficult to overstate the benefits of that approach to research.”
“Joy’s contributions to this report help provide important context for news leaders who need to know how audiences use the news.”
David Kurpius, dean of the School of Journalism
Jenkins, who has contributed to the report with Graves since 2018, agrees that the dual nature of the research — repeating the survey annually while remaining flexible enough to incorporate new trends and issues as they arise — is vital to understanding an industry that has perhaps evolved more in the last few decades than in the entire preceding century.
“The consistency of asking the same questions year after year in dozens of countries makes this such a valuable resource for looking at trends over time,” Jenkins said. “And of course, they add new elements every year, like this year’s focus on short-form video, influencers and podcasts.”
The U.S. page’s presentation of concrete data on audience behaviors from the broader survey helps explain and elaborate on trends. Only 30% of U.S. respondents, for example, said they trust news in general, but 46% said they trust the news they specifically consume. The trust rating climbed even higher for regional or local newspapers (55%) and highest for local television news (59%), indicating that public trust is a more nuanced issue — with some room for optimism — than the overall trust decline appears to suggest.
“The consistency of asking the same questions year after year in dozens of countries makes this such a valuable resource for looking at trends over time. And of course, they add new elements every year, like this year’s focus on short-form video, influencers and podcasts.”
Joy Jenkins
Nor is the report only beneficial to researchers and news managers. From the classroom to the newsroom, Jenkins finds that the information creates opportunities for conversations with anyone who has a stake in the future of journalism.
“I use it in all my classes to talk about what’s happening with news consumption trends — the scale and rigor of the research is incredibly useful for the academic community as well as the industry community,” she added. “It spurs a lot of really important conversations every year.”
One of those trends is social media platforms’ shift away from working with independent fact-checking organizations to introducing crowd-sourced systems modeled on X’s “community notes” feature, further driving a wedge between the platforms and the world of journalism. Here again, Jenkins said this component of the report offers another chance to connect to — and learn from — the experiences of her students, who have grown up in an environment dominated both by digital news and various forms of digital crowdsourcing.
“The way I teach, we talk about the traditional understanding of journalism and legacy media, but we also spend a lot of time talking about these shifts,” she said. “We talk about how journalistic standards are being complicated across social platforms. And our students, who are digital natives, don’t always know what they are consuming and who it’s coming from. So for their sake and for ours, we need to look at the data and ask, what do we want from our journalism and how can we get it?”
Read the full Digital News Report here.
Updated: July 14, 2025