Overall interest in news among Australians has risen to 57 per cent, up four percentage points since 2023.
Leading that increase are under-35s, whose interest has jumped 12 percentage points over the same period, alongside women, up four points.
The proportion of Australians accessing news more than once a day has climbed to 56 per cent, an eight-point gain since 2023, with 18-to-24-year-olds recording a 13-point increase.
For the first time on record, under-35s now report higher levels of interest in politics than Australians aged 35 and over, a significant reversal of a long-standing generational trend.
The renewed appetite for news aligns with deepening concerns over the broader information landscape.
Australians now rank as the most worried nation across all 48 countries in the global study when it comes to what is real or fake online, with 77 per cent expressing concern about misinformation, up three percentage points.
This concern over access to quality information may help explain why Australians are increasingly voting with their wallets.
Despite persistent cost-of-living pressures, 23 per cent of Australians paid for online news in the past year, well ahead of the global average of 17 per cent.
The contrast between trust in established journalism and trust in newer information channels is telling.
While trust in the news Australians personally choose to consume stands at 54 per cent, up five percentage points, trust in news from AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity sits at just 19 per cent, and trust in news on social media is only marginally higher at 21 per cent.
The report, based on a nationally representative online survey of more than 2000 Australians conducted earlier this year, concludes that quality journalism is what builds trust, and trust in turn drives deeper audience engagement.
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