Relatable but Not Trusted: What the Reuters Report Reveals About Citizen Video
The Reuters Institute's 2026 Digital News Report landed on June 16. It's the most comprehensive annual snapshot of global news consumption, and this year it has one finding that every person filming news on their phone should sit with.
Seventy-seven percent of people across the countries studied watch online news video every week. Most of them watch it on social platforms, not on news publishers' own sites. That number was 69% in 2021. Video is winning, and it's winning on your turf.
Here's the part that stings.
Audiences describe citizen creators as more relatable, more engaging, and easier to understand than traditional media organizations. They also describe them as less trustworthy and less impartial.
Both findings are in the same report.
The Relatability Trap
When people say you're relatable, they mean you feel human and immediate. That's earned by showing up where events happen, speaking plainly, and not running footage through the filter of a satellite truck and a network graphics package.
But trustworthy is different. Trust is built through consistency, accuracy, and what happens after you post.
Traditional outlets have correction policies. They have editors. When they get something wrong, there's usually a paper trail. Most individual citizen journalists don't have that structure. And audiences, even the ones who prefer creator content, know it.
That's not a reason to stop filming. It's a reason to build credibility the same way you'd build a reputation for anything else: deliberately, over time.
What You Can Actually Do
Sourcing comes first. If your footage shows something, say where you were, what time it was, and what you saw. Don't editorialize beyond what the video shows. Let the footage carry the news.
Consistency comes second. A person who has filmed twenty local stories accurately is harder to dismiss than someone with one viral clip. The Reuters report also found that audiences don't see creator content as a replacement for traditional journalism - they consume both. Your footage can get picked up, checked, and amplified by newsrooms that have more verification infrastructure than you do on your own.
Accountability is the third piece. If you get something wrong, say so. Out loud, in the same channel where you posted. Nothing kills trust faster than silence when a clip turns out to be mislabeled or out of context.
The Bigger Picture
The report describes what it calls the "platformization" of news. Social platforms and video networks now reach more people than television and publishers' own properties combined. That's not a trend. It's a structural shift.
It also means the competition for credibility on those platforms is growing. Audiences are getting better at reading what's real and what isn't. If your footage gets picked up by a newsroom, it carries a signal that someone with more verification resources decided it was worth using.
This is part of why the chain of custody for citizen footage matters. As we explored in The UGC Ghost Shift, once a clip goes viral, verification becomes reactive. Getting ahead of that problem - knowing who filmed what, when, and where - is the difference between footage that gets used and footage that gets doubted.
What the 77% Actually Means
The fact that audiences find citizen video more relatable isn't just flattery. It means people are watching, and they want to keep watching. The trust gap is something you can close, not a ceiling on the format.
The question is whether you think of yourself as someone who films things, or someone building a body of work with a reputation attached to it. Those are two different jobs.
The 77% already found you. What you do next determines whether they stay.
Ready to put footage where it counts? Start at pov.live.
Photo by Rich Tervet on Unsplash.
