Three major outlets experienced sudden swings in their audiences this year—changes that align almost perfectly with how often they were promoted on some of the biggest news aggregators. Newsweek’s traffic plunged in April after steady promotion the month prior. Qatari-backed Al Jazeera saw its readership explode in March. And leftist outlet The Minnesota Star Tribune rode a steep wave upward in January before bottoming out again the next month. The timing was too consistent to ignore.
Al Jazeera, Newsweek and The Minnesota Star Tribune all have one thing in common: their traffic spikes coincided with the rise and fall of their promotion on three of the most-trafficked digital news gatekeepers—Apple News, Google News and Microsoft’s MSN. These three news aggregator websites collectively boast hundreds of millions of website visits each month.
MRC’s Findings of Big Four News Apps’ Top 20 Morning Editions from Nov. 1, 2025 - April 30, 2026:
- As the news aggregators go, so go the elitist media outlets. Al Jazeera, Newsweek and The Minnesota Star Tribune saw a rise or fall in website traffic coinciding with the rise or fall of their promotion on a news aggregator website.
- Newsweek traffic decreased 69% year on year from April 2025 to April 2026. It similarly fell 34% from March to April, according to Press Gazette.
- Newsweek’s 34% drop coincided with MSN’s traffic falling 6% month on month from March to April. MRC data show that Microsoft’s MSN promoted 104 Newsweek stories in March, far more than the 86 stories it promoted in April.
- Al Jazeera saw its website traffic swell 182% year on year to 39 million visits in March 2026, while also seeing a 143% uptick month on month from February 2026 to March 2026, according to Press Gazette.
- Google News increased its promotion of Al Jazeera by 250% in the month of March. The upswing in promotion coincided with the Qatari-backed outlets’ massive 143% increase in online visits. MRC data show that Google News promoted six Al Jazeera stories in February and 21 stories in March.
- The Minnesota Star Tribune saw a massive 67% year on year upswing in traffic in January 2026, while also experiencing a 126% month over month traffic increase from December 2025 to January 2026.
- The Minnesota Star Tribune’s monumental rise into Press Gazette’s top 50 U.S. news websites in January coincided with anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis, and fell 48% the very next month. MRC data show that in January, Apple News and Google News collectively promoted the Star Tribune 16 times. In February, the dropoff was sharp: Apple News and Google News promoted only five total stories from the outlet.
As Go The News Aggregators, So Go The Elitist Media Outlets
When a major news aggregator frequently shares content from a particular outlet, it’s highly likely that the outlet will see a significant bump in website traffic. Conversely, if the news aggregator stops sharing stories from that outlet, a decline in traffic is all but inevitable. Tech giant news aggregators like Apple News, Google News and Microsoft’s MSN rank among the top 10 for news in the United States, underscoring their influence. Apple News claims to attract 125 million monthly visits on its app, while MSN garnered 127.3 million and Google News drew 92.9 million — placing them sixth and ninth, respectively, on Press Gazette’s top 50 list for April 2026.
Media outlets can also take a hit in website traffic if they aren’t getting promoted as heavily by a news aggregator. The curious case of Newsweek is a prime example.
After Microsoft’s MSN featured Newsweek stories heavily in March, its number of placements noticeably dropped in April. The outlet’s website traffic followed the same downward trajectory.
Data Breakdown: For Newsweek, April brought a convergence of two different factors that resulted in a 34% overall drop in website traffic month over month. First, Microsoft’s MSN traffic itself fell 6% from March to April. The news aggregator’s total website traffic in April was 127.3 million.
Making matters worse for Newsweek, as traffic to MSN’s website declined, MRC data show that the news aggregator also promoted fewer Newsweek stories and did not rank the stories it promoted as high in April as it had in March.
In March, Microsoft’s MSN promoted 104 Newsweek stories with an average position of 8.7 out of the daily top 20 morning editions. Microsoft’s MSN ranked 64 of Newsweek’s stories in March in the top ten.
However, in April, Microsoft’s MSN only promoted 86 total Newsweek stories, with an average placement of 9.9. Of these, only 41 were included in the top ten stories each day in the mornings.
While Newsweek saw gains, Al Jazeera felt the opposite effect. Al Jazeera’s website traffic numbers soared in the same month that Google News’s promotion of the outlet trended up.
In February, the outlet appeared only a handful of times in Google News’s top stories. By March, it was showing up nearly three times as often, sometimes even landing in the top spot on the news aggregator’s webpage. Tellingly, site visits surged alongside the increased exposure on Google News.
Data Breakdown: Google News promoted six stories from Al Jazeera in its daily top stories throughout February 2026. The news aggregator placed the Al Jazeera stories anywhere from the fifth spot to the fifteenth spot during February. In the same month, Al Jazeera had roughly 14,812,000 visits.
However, in March, Google News promoted Al Jazeera stories 250% more than it did in February. Google News featured 21 Al Jazeera stories in March, with four of them positioned in the top spot on the news aggregator and the outlet’s stories averaging fifth on the webpage. At the same time, the overall traffic numbers for the Al Jazeera site increased 143%, to 16.1 million views.
Much like with Al Jazeera, the Star Tribune’s readership nearly doubled from December to January amid widespread fraud allegations and anti-ICE protests, elevating the paper into the Press Gazette’s top 50. The surge came as both Apple News and Google News began highlighting the outlet’s coverage. The following month, when promotion by the two digital news gatekeepers slowed, traffic for the Star Tribune fell almost as quickly as it had risen.
A report from Nieman Lab explained that the Star Tribune saw a spike in web traffic of 138% from December 2025 to January 2026, close to double the site’s typical traffic for the month. The findings correspond with MRC data.
Data Breakdown: When tensions on the streets of Minneapolis rose to a fever pitch in January 2026, Apple News promoted 11 Star Tribune stories and Google News promoted five in their morning editions. Comparatively, Apple News alone pushed only one Star Tribune story in the prior month. That anti-Trump story — promoted Dec. 8 — was headlined, “Trump claims Minnesota lost billions to fraud. The evidence to date isn't close.”
Nieman Lab noted that out-of-state web traffic accounted for 61% of all Star Tribune traffic in January. The uptick was 177% higher than the average over the course of 2025. Local website traffic was up 37% in January over the 2025 average.
While the Star Tribune made its way into the Press Gazette’s top 50 U.S. news websites in January, its traffic fell by 49% in February. This closely correlated with Apple News and Google News slowing the promotion of Star Tribunestories in those months. In February, the two tech giants combined to promote only five Star Tribune stories.
Methodology: From Nov. 1, 2025 - Apr. 30, 2026, the Media Research Center examined the top 20 stories featured each day on the Big Four News Apps — Apple News, Google News, Microsoft’s MSN, and Yahoo News — at approximately 8:30 AM ET. The data was cross-referenced with a Nieman Lab report on local news site traffic and the Press Gazette’s top 50 U.S. news websites.
