☀️ Happy Thursday! The Briefing is your guide to the world of news and information. Sign up here!
In today’s email:
- Featured story: A papal conclave in the social media age
- New from Pew Research Center: New data on Americans’ trust in information from news organizations and social media
- In other news: Department of Education terminates federal grant for PBS children’s shows
- Looking ahead: New company looks to pair streaming with local TV news
- Chart of the week: Republicans have become more likely since 2024 to trust info from national news organizations
🔥 Featured story
Robert Francis Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, was selected today as the first American leader of the Roman Catholic Church following the death of Pope Francis. The first conclave since 2013 prompted discussion about whether any news would leak from inside the Sistine Chapel and the role of social media in this global news event. Ahead of Leo’s selection, social media users shared their opinions about possible candidates.
In the U.S., most Catholics say they want the church to be more inclusive, even if that means changing some of its teachings, according to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey. Majorities of U.S. Catholics say the church should allow its members to use birth control, permit priests to marry and ordain women as deacons. But Catholics who attend Mass at least weekly are less supportive of these changes.
During his papacy, the Argentine-born Francis – the first pope from outside Europe since the eighth century – appointed cardinals who tilted the leadership structure of the Catholic Church away from its historic European base. At the beginning of his papacy in 2013, 51% of voting-age cardinals were from Europe, according to a 2025 Center analysis. At the time of his death, 40% were European.
🚨 New from Pew Research Center
Americans are now more likely to trust information from national news organizations, local news organizations and social media sites than they were last year, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. These changes are largely driven by an increase in trust among Republicans, which has coincided with President Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
📌 In other news
- Department of Education terminates federal grant for PBS children’s shows
- Kari Lake says Voice of America will broadcast programming from One America News
- Meta reportedly bans a Muslim news page in India at the government’s request
- Columbia student journalist faces threat to graduation for covering a pro-Palestinian protest
- Influencer briefings at the White House include an overwhelmingly right-leaning group
- 2025 Pulitzer Prize winners announced
- A look at strong revenue reports for Fox News, The Guardian and The New York Times
- Scammers hijacked a student radio website and turned it into a zombie AI farm
📅 Looking ahead
A news organization is looking to transform the business model for local TV news. The Local plans to create a network of new bureaus in every state, securing funding from contracts with streaming platforms instead of a reliance on advertising. This comes amid a recent trend of layoffs for local TV news stations, as well as potential budget cuts at the national level for local public media.
There is evidence that local TV news audiences have shrunk in a 2024 Center study: About a third of U.S. adults (32%) say they prefer to get their local news via television, down from 41% in 2018.
Meanwhile, Americans are increasingly getting local news online, even when it comes to content from local TV stations. Among Americans who say they get news from local TV, a majority (62%) still say they primarily access it on a television set, but 37% say they mainly access that information online – whether from a TV station’s website, app, email newsletter or social media posts.
📊 Chart of the week
This week’s chart is from our new analysis of Americans’ trust in information from news organizations and social media.
Americans are now more likely to say they trust information from national news organizations than they were last year. This is largely driven by an increase in trust among Republicans: Around half (53%) now say they have at least some trust in national news organizations, a 13 percentage point increase from September 2024. Between 2016 and 2024, Republicans’ trust in the national news media declined substantially.
Still, Republicans remain much less likely than Democrats (81%) to trust national news organizations. Levels of trust among Democrats have remained relatively stable over the past decade.
👋 That’s all for this week.
The Briefing is compiled by Pew Research Center staff, including Naomi Forman-Katz, Jacob Liedke, Christopher St. Aubin, Luxuan Wang and Emily Tomasik. It is edited by Michael Lipka and copy edited by Anna Jackson.
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