The Digital News Report, the most extensive media consumption survey globally, highlights O GLOBO’s significant position in 2025. In its centennial year, the newspaper is noted by 22% of surveyed individuals as their weekly read, earning the title of the most reliable in its category. O GLOBO’s reach surpasses major competitors, “Folha de S.Paulo” (10%) and “O Estado de São Paulo” (8%). The newspaper also leads in the online sphere, with 22% readership.
This year, the survey interviewed 97,000 people (2,000 of whom were in Brazil) and was produced by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, affiliated with the University of Oxford (UK). The Digital News Report has been conducted annually since 2012 and represents a key reference for industry analysts monitoring news consumption trends across 40 countries.
The report also examines public trust in newspapers and the journalism profession worldwide. In 2025, O GLOBO is also the leading Brazilian newspaper in terms of public trust. It is considered trustworthy by 54% of the Brazilian respondents, ahead of “Estadão” (53%) and “Folha” (52%), other Brazilian newspapers.
All three media outlets boast a respectability level above the industry average, which stands at 42% nationally. Journalism lost trust after 2015, partly due to the proliferation of misinformation on social media; however, this decline stabilized over the past three years in Brazil, surpassing the global average of 40%.
“News consumers largely remain skeptical about the information found on social media and through AI apps, partly due to concerns about the reliability of such content,” says Rodrigo Carro, journalist and a former fellow at the Reuters Institute that is currently responsible for the analysis of Brazil’s data in the Digital News Report. “These doubts present opportunities for publishers, as audiences still seek out established news outlets to verify information.”
Brazilians are the most trusting of news among Latin Americans, according to the report. In Latin America, Argentina is where people trust journalism the least (32%), ten percentage points below the Brazilian level of trust in the media. Worldwide, Finland (67%), Nigeria (68%), and Thailand (55%) are the countries with the highest news trust.
A concerning statistic is that a significant share of the audience still struggles to distinguish between real and fake news. In Brazil, this percentage is 67%, lower than in Nigeria (84%), South Africa (73%), and the United States (73%).
Report authors highlight that the Brazilian media is still undergoing a transformation, particularly in the audiovisual sector, as streaming services attempt to encroach on the dominance of television.
O GLOBO also performs well within the Brazilian media landscape. The newspaper ranks fourth overall in both traditional media (TV, radio, and newspapers) and online media. In the traditional media category, it trails only TV Globo, which is consumed weekly by 41% of respondents, followed by Record (31%) and SBT (23%). In online media, it is surpassed only by G1/Globo News online, which leads with 32%, followed by UOL (30%) and globo.com (27%).
The report also revealed that 17% of the interviewed people paid for news in some form this year in Brazil. There is a significant circulation of news shared via the internet, with 33% of people claiming to share articles on social media networks. The top three platforms for news consumption in Brazil are YouTube (37%), Instagram (37%), and WhatsApp (36%).
Among traditional online outlets, a major development is the impact of new artificial intelligence tools on how people stay informed. Approximately 9% of respondents report using AI chatbots to search for news.
O GLOBO is highlighted as a media outlet that effectively harnesses the AI revolution positively, using it creatively in journalism.
“For instance, O GLOBO published a series based on 600,000 speeches made in the Chamber of Deputies and Senate from 2001 to 2024,” the Digital News Report notes. “Over 255 million words and expressions were analyzed over four months using AI tools.” The series “Com a Palavra” was published last August.
The survey indicates that despite AI’s growing popularity among news consumers, the audience still places special trust in content curated by humans.
“In a world increasingly filled with synthetic content and misinformation, all generations still value reliable brands with a history of accuracy, even if they don’t use them as frequently as before,” point out the report’s authors.
