2026: The Year ofIntentional Media
This report is brought to you by PressReader, the leading digital platform for newspapers, magazines and books. With millions of readers around the world, and deep relationships with global publishers, we have a unique perspective to predict the major trends in digital publishing for 2026.
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Introduction
After a decade of chasing clicks, scrolls and alerts, digital publishing is hitting a wall. People still care deeply about the content they consume, but they’re also overwhelmed, anxious, stretched across multiple platforms and busy navigating AI’s impact.
In response, audiences are changing how they engage with content. Rather than consuming whatever demands attention, they’re becoming more selective about what earns their time.
It's a shift to what we're calling intentional media.
Intentional media is content people choose because it fits into their lives. It’s media designed to support focus, understanding and everyday routines. It helps people learn, unwind and make sense of the world without overwhelming them.
In 2026, we expect publishers to increasingly shift their focus from simply capturing attention to restoring and refining it.
We predict that this shift will show up in three ways:
- Lifestyle gravity
Hobbies, rituals, puzzles and service journalism as loyalty drivers. - Ambient news
AI-assisted, personalized, multimodal “briefs” becoming the front door to journalism. - Trust as a product
Trust moving from an abstract virtue to a core experience built through tone, labeling and clarity.
These aren’t trends around the edges of news. They’re the new center of value and they shape our vision for 2026, the year of intentional media.
As you read this report, I invite you to explore our predictions and how we expect them to shape the publishing sector over the next year.
Ruairí Doyle
CEO, PressReader
Methodology
How we made our predictions
In developing this report and our predictions for 2026, we leveraged a comprehensive approach combining quantitative data, qualitative insights and external research.
Global PressReader usage data
- 3.34 billion total article opens in 2025
- Millions of readers from 139 countries
- 8,400 titles read in 64 languages
Publisher conversations
PressPectives podcast episodes featuring publishers such as Dow Jones, Vox, Le Monde, Are Media and WEHCO Media
PressReader perspectives
- Interviews with PressReader's executive leadership team
External sources
- Research from sources like Reuters Institute, Gartner, Deloitte, Pew Research Center and Ofcom
- Presentations at global events hosted by European Business Media and FIPP, among others
We used AI to analyze patterns in the raw, non-personalized reader data, and conducted human reviews, discussion, debates and prioritization to land on our predictions.
A note on our internal data: Data from PressReader users reflects reading behavior within the PressReader ecosystem. Patterns are shaped by the titles available on the platform and by some of our large B2B partnerships that drive greater usage in specific regions.
Key insights for 2026
Three transformative trends reshaping the media landscape
INSIGHT 1
Lifestyle gravity:hobbyism becomes the new loyalty driver
Prediction
By the end of 2026, non-news content will surpass news content consumption, accounting for at least 55% of total audience minutes. 1 Puzzles, games and practical “what this means for me” service content will become the most appealing daily hooks.
1 In 2025, non-news content accounted for 48.5% of total reading minutes on PressReader. News content (including articles on topics like: politics, news, local news, business, economy, crime, industry, society, Donald Trump, conflict, warfare and military) accounted for 51.5%.
People are protecting their nervous systems — and that's evolving their relationship with digital publishing.
People are increasingly reading lifestyle and hobbyist content across categories like food, health, puzzles, travel and wellness. For many publishers, these “everyday” formats now command more time and more repeat visits than hard news.
That shift aligns with what broader research has been saying for a while: news avoidance is real, persistent and often rooted in fatigue. Reuters Institute has tracked rising feelings of news anxiety and a long-term trend toward prioritizing entertainment, lifestyle and service content instead.
In 2025, the number of readers that primarily consumed political content dropped by 12%. 2 This compares to a 7.2% increase the previous year.
2 This refers to PressReader users for whom at least 50% of total article consumption was tagged as “politics”.
But here’s the more useful interpretation for 2026: avoidance doesn’t automatically mean apathy or the end of news. Newspapers still accounted for 85.5% of the content read on PressReader last year. That’s why we’ve expanded our catalog with key global news titles such as JoongAng Ilbo (Korea), Punch Nigeria (Nigeria), Il Giornale (Italy) and Le Telegramme (France). They've joined other leading news titles on the platform like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Le Monde.
What people are doing is selecting media that gives them something back, be it clarity, comfort, competence or a small sense of progress. At the end of the day, utility and joy beat confrontation and fatigue.
CONTENT SHIFT:
North America
Topics shown are representative highlights from 2024–2025 and are not listed in any particular order.
2024 Top Topics
- Politics
- U.S. News
- Business
- Sports
- Crime
- Elections
- Canada News
- Celebrities
- Incidents
2025 Top Topics
- Food
- Healthy Living
- Cooking & Recipes
- Politics
- Business
- Tech
- Lifehacks
- Arts
- Comfort Food
CONTENT SHIFT:
Europe & Asia
Topics shown are representative highlights from 2024–2025 and are not listed in any particular order.
2024 Top Topics
- Politics
- Business
- Elections
- U.S. News
- Society
- Crime
- U.S. Politics
- Middle East News
- Sports
- Finance
- Social Science
2025 Top Topics
- Science
- Space
- Wildlife
- Society
- Plants
- Social Issues
- Ecology
- Renewable Energy
- Wind Power
- Environmental Economics
What to expect in 2026
Publishers, platforms and media brands will need to:
Treat lifestyle content as a premium product with various formats and series worth coming back for.
Build daily rituals people can rely on: puzzles, mini-challenges, streaks and
small wins.
Make service journalism tangible: clearly explain what this means for the reader.
For readers, the shift will feel simpler. The media that wins is the media that makes their day easier or richer.
How PressReader is meeting this trend
We’ve expanded access to leading lifestyle and general-interest publications, including TIME magazine and The New Yorker, while making the full Condé Nast portfolio — from Architectural Digest to Vanity Fair — available to content distribution partners such as libraries and hotels. We also launched puzzles in late 2025. With more than 80,000 games played in November alone, this reflects a growing demand for low-friction, habit-forming content.
INSIGHT 2
The rise of ambient news:intention becomes the interface
Prediction
Throughout 2026, the consumption layer will be fundamentally reshaped by AI. While publishers have long adapted their journalism for multiple channels, AI accelerates this shift by transforming content instantly and contextually, delivering the same reporting in different formats depending on where, when and how a reader engages.
Hyper-personalized audio briefings, summaries and AI-generated digests will account for an increasing share of daily news entry points, rivaling text feeds for many under-40s.
“AI is not just a tool — it’s a new delivery and entry point opportunity for media consumption.”
That’s how Ruairí Doyle, CEO of PressReader, sees it. He anticipates that AI will increasingly become the experiential layer, shaping summaries, presentation and delivery and providing readers with new ways to discover relevant content and perspectives.
Increasingly, ambient news engagement will look like a:
- tailored briefing while you make coffee
- 30-second summary before a meeting
- two-minute audio explainer on a walk
- “just the key numbers” view when you’re short on time
- daily email with articles related to your interests
- synopsis of how different publications, countries and journalists are covering a topic
- deep dive into the story or angle that matters to you
This is where AI stops being a novelty and starts becoming infrastructure. Not because audiences are obsessed with AI itself, but because they’re drawn to the convenience of these assistant-style experiences. It's also shaping how people enter the news ecosystem in the first place.
Our publishing partners agree. Sheryn Weiss from Dow Jones and Joe Revill from Are Media both highlighted multi-context consumption and user convenience as priorities on their episodes of the PressPectives Podcast. Meanwhile, Lou Grasser from Le Monde spoke about the need to tailor news products to evolving context and user needs.
For more insights from industry leaders, explore episodes from our PressPectives Podcast.
Listen now
The job of publishers hasn’t changed. It’s still to create trusted journalism. What’s changing is everything that happens after that. AI becomes the layer that transforms that work instantly into whatever form the reader, their assistant or agent, actually needs in the moment.
What to expect in 2026
Publishers, platforms and media brands will need to:
- Protect their brand voice with AI as an increasingly leveraged discovery and experiential layer.
- Experiment with and adopt new AI consumption channels and experiences.
- Proactively define rules for how AI can transform their content.
- Create robust metadata tagging systems so AI can identify what content to surface for each reader. This metadata should also be flexible to account for non-text formats like audio.
- Expect readers to switch up how they engage with content.
The winners will be the brands that make those transformations feel trustworthy, aligned and human.
How PressReader is meeting this trend
Most recently, to support streamlined discovery, we introduced iOS and Android home screen widgets which surface key stories from across trusted publishers in low-friction, everyday moments to drive reading traffic that fairly compensates publishers. Meanwhile, topic carousels — currently in beta — help readers explore multiple perspectives on a single story without relying on algorithmic feeds.
These small, incremental changes to our product are designed to simplify the reader experience. Our team is actively experimenting to identify where AI can further support discovery and democratize content access in a way that best supports our readers and publishing partners in 2026.
INSIGHT 3
Trust as a product:calmer tone, labeling and useful news
Prediction
Throughout 2026, calm, labeled, personalized news formats become a key retention differentiator.
Trust will be expressed by design:
- AI-use disclosure becomes a default UX norm
- Provenance and corrections become easier to find, not buried
- “What this means for me” framing drives deeper sessions and repeat habits
This is perhaps the most resonant truth in the whole report: people aren’t rejecting journalism. They’re rejecting the feeling it gives them.
Pew Research Center has tracked how news makes Americans feel. In 2025, 84% said they feel angry, 81% feel sad and 66% feel scared at least some of the time. It’s no wonder we’re seeing a movement from audiences towards content that feels calmer and easier to process.
At the same time, audiences are actively seeking context and perspective. On PressReader, 39% of content read is published outside the reader’s current country. That pattern reflects a growing appetite for global viewpoints: expatriates and travelers staying connected to home and curious readers cross-checking narratives.
Trust today is ultimately about whether your content helps people make sense of the world without heightening anxiety. As a result, the next phase in trust building will be experiential.
That looks like:
- Using a calmer, more explanatory tone
- Clear labeling of what something is (e.g., analysis vs. reporting vs. opinion)
- Visible provenance and “how this is reported” context to highlight the role of AI
- Tools that make relevance obvious (e.g., calculators and local context)
Vox Media Case Study
Vox Media shows how trust is increasingly built through explanation, not alarm.
In a PressPectives episode, Vox Editor-in-Chief and Publisher Swati Sharma said explanation is Vox’s core value proposition. This means helping audiences understand why something is happening, not just what happened. That clarity functions as a service to the reader, especially in moments of complexity or overload.
Vox emphasizes the value of clearly distinguishing between facts, interpretation and what remains unknown. Tone is treated as an editorial decision, with a focus on measured, non-alarmist framing that prioritizes understanding over outrage. This explanatory core also travels well across formats, from video to audio to shareable modules.
What to expect in 2026
Publishers, platforms and media brands will need to:
- Standardize AI-use labels and provenance, explaining to readers how they use the tool (like we did at the top of this report).
- Prioritize “what this means for me” framing that lends a personalized experience.
- Expand explainers and evergreen topic pages that assistants can cite reliably.
How the news makes people feel
Based on Pew Research Center findings about American readers.
How PressReader is meeting this trend
Our vision as a company is to create the world’s most trusted content platform. Trusted by readers, trusted by publishers and trusted by business partners. In a moment when trust is increasingly shaped by tone, transparency and context, that ethos matters more than ever. Our role in 2026 is to carry that principle forward: creating calm, credible and transparent content experiences that help people understand the world without adding to the noise.
We partner with businesses and publishers to connect readers to thousands of digital newspapers and magazines, instantly.
Conclusion
Entering the Year ofIntentional Media
As media enters this next chapter, there’s an opportunity to show up with greater care. Intentional media asks a different question: not how do we capture people, but how do we support them?
The publishers and platforms that thrive in 2026 will be the ones that design for real life — for moments of curiosity, routine, rest and reflection — and that treat trust, clarity and usefulness as foundational.
For organizations navigating these changes, the challenge now is to build with intention at every layer: from format and tone to technology and trust. PressReader continues to explore how high-quality content can be discovered, experienced and transformed in ways that serve both readers and publishers.
Ready to shape the future of media?
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