Local radio news brands are holding their own in weekly reach, according to new global survey data from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, but the medium faces a growing reckoning due to a generation not adopting the habit like their predecessors.
Based on a YouGov survey of more than 2,000 US respondents fielded from mid-January to the end of February, the Reuters Digital News Report 2026 found local radio news drew 10% weekly reach among individual US news brands tracked. NPR news drew 8%. While this places radio brands behind television, AM/FM remains roughly in line with regional newspapers and ahead of most national newspaper properties.
Radio also has avoided the precipitous drop of television news reach, which fell from 72% in 2013 to 45% this year, while social media and video platforms climbed to 56%, overtaking both TV and news websites as the country’s top news source.
The report’s authors point to a structural explanation for radio’s audience gap rather than a simple platform shift. Radio’s global adoption rate, the share of the public who have ever used it weekly, sits at 53% across the 45 markets tracked. Radio’s retention, or the share of adopters still listening weekly, is 39%, compared to 66% for TV, a pattern researchers say mirrors newspapers more closely than television.
The findings conflict with a separate YouGov survey from last month, which found radio news reaching 28% of Americans monthly, ahead of podcasts, newsletters, print, and AI chatbots, and follow a Pew Research Center report earlier this year naming radio the most resilient traditional local news source, with usage down just four points since 2018, a smaller drop than local TV or daily newspapers saw over the same period.
However, the Reuters data lands squarely inside the framing of the NAB’s ongoing push to loosen radio ownership caps, which cited similar erosion in recent FCC filings, arguing that broadcasters face market-by-market ownership limits while Big Tech platforms compete for the same audiences and ad dollars with no such restrictions.
