MEDIA: The Australian continues to increase its audience, recording strong growth in readership over the past month, with more than three million readers across its digital and print platforms. 
The latest official figures show The Australian's total audience increased by 2.1 per cent month-on-month in   October, according to the Enhanced Media Metric Australia (EMMA) data.
The Courier-Mail grew its audience by 3.3 per cent to 2.95 million, while The Daily Telegraph's numbers slipped by just 1.4 per cent to 4 million readers. The Herald Sun was flat for the month at 3.87 million.
All four titles are published by News Corp, which reached more than 15.5 million people across all its publications last month - spanning newspapers, magazines and online properties.
The Australian Financial Review, a Fairfax-owned title, fell by 0.1 per cent to 1.48 million readers, while the The Sydney Morning Herald suffered a bigger fall - down 2.3 per cent to 5.03 million.
Fairfax's Victorian masthead, The Age, also dropped in readership, with a decline of 1.4 per cent to 3.1 million.
The results come as a new survey shows that newspaper ads remain the most trusted form of advertising, while social media has a trust problem. Newspapers have been named as the medium in which the public has the most faith, with almost six in 10 respondents to a survey saying they "completely" or "somewhat" trust ads in newspapers.
The Global Trust in Advertising Report, undertaken by Nielsen, asked 30,000 adults in 60 countries to what extent they considered different forms of advertising to be honest.
Newspapers were deemed more dependable than other channels, including television, magazines, radio, outdoor, mobile, search engines and social networks.
Among the least trusted is social media, which suggests platforms like Facebook continue to suffer from a lack of transparency in the digital ecosystem.
Trust between the big digital platforms, consumers and brands is being strained by fraud, inconsistent measurements, weak privacy controls and countless other complex issues.
Although levels of trust in social media are rising, the scores are still much lower than for newspapers.Twice as many people trust ads in newspapers (58 per cent) compared with social networks (29 per cent), the survey found.