By Juan S. Larrosa-Fuentes (July 13, 2026)
Since 2012, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, based at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, has published an annual report on the state of news and journalism around the world. This research program emerged amid a global crisis in the news industry: beginning in 2008, newspapers started shutting down in cities around the world, and the number of journalists declined dramatically year after year. In this context, a central need was to have systematic and reliable information about the changes taking place in the world of news and journalism.
This year’s report has already been published, and one of its most important conclusions is that, in 2025, for the first time in history, more people got their news through digital and video platforms than through traditional media such as newspapers, radio, or television.
This may seem obvious, since many of us have primarily obtained our news through digital media and platforms for years. However, from a historical perspective, this development is highly significant because it documents a global transformation in how human societies obtain information compared with much of the twentieth century. It is a change that cannot be reversed and that has affected the worlds of politics, economics, and culture.
Mexico is no exception. In the section devoted to our country, the report shows that 82% of the population said they had consumed some type of journalistic information through digital media, while 66% said they did so through social media. In addition, the report indicates that last year 34% of the population said they got their news from television and 16% from print newspapers. In less than ten years, consumption of traditional media plummeted: television lost 31 percentage points and newspapers, 35.
This is no minor issue. Twenty years ago, in 2006, Televisa and TV Azteca still strongly dominated Mexico’s information ecosystem and wielded significant political power in the country’s electoral and legislative life. Since then, a reform of the Federal Telecommunications Law allowed new players to enter the television industry, while the ratings of television newscasts have declined year after year. It would be a mistake to believe that television has lost all its power and that now “everything happens on social media”; but its influence on public life has certainly diminished considerably.
What changes does a society undergo when, in just two decades, it moves from a journalistic information system highly concentrated in the hands of a handful of television networks, radio broadcasters, and newspapers to a fragmented system in which digital platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, and TikTok—none of them Mexican, nor considered media organizations—now dominate the distribution of information? These changes, dear listeners, are taking place right before our eyes, and we need to analyze them, one by one, with depth and interest.
This was a production by Juan Larrosa for NTR Radio News. If you would like to read this commentary, visit my blog at triple double u dot juan hyphen larrosa dot com. Until next time.
This text was originally broadcast on NTR Radio News on July 13, 2026, hosted by journalist Sonia Serrano.