In 2015, 70% of UK respondents to the Reuters Institute's annual survey called themselves extremely or very interested in news. This year it is 37% — the second-largest fall of the ten markets the report compares on a 2015 baseline, and the largest in proportional terms.
Each year YouGov asks the same question for the Reuters Institute: how interested are you in news? In the UK the share answering “extremely” or “very” was 70% in 2015. In the 2026 report, fielded from mid-January to the end of February, it is 37%.1 That is a fall of 33 percentage points, leaving stated interest at just over half its 2015 level.
The report publishes 2015 comparisons for ten markets. Only Argentina fell further in percentage-point terms, from 77% to 43%. Spain lost 31 points from a much higher base of 85%, Germany 23, France 22 and the United States 19. Two of the ten barely moved: Finland slipped three points to 61%, and South Korea was unchanged at 41%.14
The report's own like-for-like comparison does not begin in 2015. It begins in 2021, covers 46 markets, and shows an average fall of 13 percentage points, from 59% to just under 46%.1 The decade view exists for a handful of markets only: most of the current 48 were not surveyed in 2015. Some summaries of this year's report have described the UK's 33-point fall as a five-year change; it is a ten-year one.5
The decade also spans a change in who was counted. Until 2020 the survey screened out respondents who said they had consumed no news in the past month. From 2021 that group — low-interest by definition — has been included. The Reuters Institute states the change moved some figures by one or two points in the UK, the United States and Australia.2 A point or two of the UK's 33 is therefore definitional rather than behavioural.
Finally, this is an online, non-probability panel of about 2,000 people per market — 2,052 in the UK — so no conventional margin of error applies. The Institute treats gaps of two percentage points or less as not meaningful.2 The UK's move sits far outside that; Finland's three points barely clears it.
The report does not publish 2015 figures for every market, so the UK's decade fall can be ranked only against the nine others shown, not against all 48. The Institute's rebuilt data explorer carries core indicators back to 2013 and would support a full annual series rather than two endpoints; it needs an export from the tool and is not used here, so this piece cannot say whether the decline was steady or abrupt. The survey also records what people say about their interest, not what they do, and nothing in it establishes why.