The habit is no longer hypothetical. In the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2026, 10 percent of people across the markets surveyed said they had used an AI chatbot for news in the last week. A year earlier the figure was 7 percent. Among people under 35 it is 16 percent. The Institute is clear that this is still a supplement. The people doing it are, on the whole, already interested in news. Very few rely on a chatbot alone.
That is the useful correction to both the panic and the shrug. Chatbots are not the new television. They are a new door, used first by the readers you most want, and growing.
The rest of the report explains why the door matters. Interest in news, in the markets the Institute can compare with 2021, has fallen by 13 percentage points, from 59 percent to just under 46 percent. News avoidance is flat this year and still high: 42 percent sometimes or often avoid the news, up from 29 percent when the measure started in 2017. In Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, and Turkey the figure is 60 percent or more. Attention has been drifting from television and from publishers’ own sites toward social video and other third-party platforms. A chatbot is one more third party, with the extra feature that it answers instead of linking.
For a newsroom, the product question is how to be the source inside that answer without surrendering the relationship. A citation that nobody taps is not a subscriber. A reader who is avoiding the news will not reward you for more of it in the same shape. They might take a narrower cut: one subject, a calmer tone, a format that fits a few minutes. The 10 percent are a leading indicator of that demand, not proof that the homepage is over.
Publish for the person who still comes to you, and structure the journalism so an agent can carry it faithfully when the person asks elsewhere. Those are two products. Pretending they are one interface is how you lose both.