Every year one of my favourite things to get stuck into is the Digital News Report, and the lessons it offers for how a changing media landscape impacts how informed we are about the world. I’ve been publishing analysis on the report since Zee Feed’s first year in 2020.
The 2025 Digital News Report (which you can read in full here) tackles newer topics like AI and podcasting, but also sounds the alarm on a growing trend: women’s disinterest in news.
QUICK RECAP: The Digital News Report is an annual, global study on news and media consumption run by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. The 2025 instalment was conducted in 48 counties, in partnership with universities in each location. The Australian survey is run by the University of Canberra. The same online survey is delivered to around 2000 people in each country. While this piece will focus on the local findings, the report also makes comparisons to other countries and ranks Australia in certain categories.
The growing gender news gap is about intentionality
In 2025, women are less engaged in the news than men. While 67% of men access news more than once per day, only 44% of women do the same.
Women avoid news more than men (72% vs 67%).
And, unsurprisingly, women are much less interested in the news than men (45% vs 65%). Over the past 10 years the number of women interested in news has dropped significantly, from 60% in 2016 to just 45% in 2025 – less than half.
This matters a lot, as I wrote about in 2023: “The news plays a significant role in shaping the foundations of our society and influencing the decisions made about how it all works. If women opt out of this conversation – and news outlets are in constant conversation with their audiences – then we rob ourselves of the opportunity to be involved in shaping the world … Powerful people pay very close attention to what’s reported in the news. Imagine how the heavily male-skewed audiences of political, economic and financial coverage influences the way news organisations cover those topics? And in turn, how that coverage influences the decisions politicians might make?”
Over the past two election cycles, Australian news media outlets have been making attempts to better address women. It hasn’t been perfect by any means, but there has been a clear effort made to better cover women’s issues, women-dominated industries, and improve the balance of female reporters, commentators and personalities (though these voices are still overwhelmingly white, older and wealthy).
So why haven’t these changes seen even a slight increase in women’s news interest and engagement? The answer is in the way women choose to consume news.
The only news source that women turn to more than men is social media. For every other method – TV, radio, print, online, podcasts and AI chatbots – men are more likely to seek out news.
It’s a problem because the news platforms that men prefer offer a more intentional style of consumption. In most cases, these require you to make a deliberate choice to consume news.
Social media is less intentional. News and news accounts are mixed into the same feed with entertainment and your social circles. Even after you have made a deliberate decision to follow a news-based account, an algorithm still determines what you will see at any given moment.
It’s much more passive than, say, choosing to listen to a news podcast (men are twice as likely to do this) or checking for news updates on a website.
When you combine age and gender, it’s even more concerning, with almost 50% of the two youngest age brackets (18-24, and 25-34) saying that social media is their main source of news. If women are disengaged and disinterested with news, then young women are most disengaged and disinterested of all.
In the past few years many new, independent news outlets have emerged hoping to produce news that includes young women, rather than excluding them as the bigger mainstream outlets have historically done. That includes Zee Feed. But many of these outlets have taken a “social-first” approach, and now consecutive years of DNR data is showing that strategy is not helping to connect women with the news the way that we’d all hoped.
I’m unashamed in my aim to have more young women actively participating in the national news discourse. This year’s DNR should be a wake up call to anyone with the same aims.
A call to arms
If you are reading this, you are the exception! I’d hazard a guess that almost everyone who reads Zee Feed is already a heavy news consumer and sees the value in news participation. You have the power to help get other women more engaged and interested in news by sharing with them.
The 2025 report found that the #1 way people interact with news is by talking about a news story with friends and colleagues, either face to face (34%) or online via DMs or messaging (13%). Both these types of sharing are slightly down compared to 2024. They are important tools of socially distributing news that, anecdotally, seems to come more easily to men.
We can and should be talking to the women in our life about the news. Sharing news stories that we find interesting, hopeful or enraging; asking for each others’ opinions and interpretations; encouraging one another to participate in this huge industry that shapes Australian life. Drop links to articles, videos, podcast eps in the group chat just like you would for other shared interests. Normalise talking about current affairs at drinks.
It doesn’t have to dominate the conversation or be the only topic of discussion, but we owe it to each other to stay informed and engaged.
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