NewsBeat

People say they prefer "side-door access" to news. Most people don't go straight to a publisher's homepage or app for news. Sixty- five percent of respondents said they prefer to access news in other ways, like search and social media. This differs a lot by country, however: "Nordic publishers still have direct relationships with their readers…Korean and Japanese publishers, on the other hand, find themselves much more dependent on third-party platforms to access audiences." The Trump bump continues… Sixteen percent of respondents in the U.S. pay for some kind of online news — with almost all of the growth coming from left-leaning people and people under 35. August 2018 NewsBeat 7 A U.S. woman in the 20- to 29-year-old age group said, "Somehow WhatsApp feels a lot more private. Like it's kind of a hybrid between texting and social media. Whereas in Facebook, for some reason it just feels like it's public. Even if you're in Messenger." This trend could be a tricky one for publishers: If these trends towards messaging apps are strengthened, it could create new dilemmas for publishers around being able to engage with ordinary citizens. The shift to messaging apps is partly driven by a desire for greater privacy, so pushing news into these spaces needs to be more organic and more conversational if it is to be accepted. In any case, setting up broadcast lists in WhatsApp is a complex and labor-intensive process (publishers have to provide a phone number which users then subscribe to)… [If] more immediate and intelligent discussion moves to messaging apps, this could make Facebook and Twitter comments even less representative of general users than they already are. Donations (i.e., one-off payments, not subscriptions) are also showing potential: While just three percent of U.S. respondents said they made a donation to a news organization in the last year, 26 percent said they'd consider it in the future. One thing that might induce people to donate more would simply be knowing about the trouble the news industry is facing: One of our new questions this year reveals that more than two-thirds of respondents (68 percent) are either unaware of the problems of the news industry or believe that most news organizations are making a profit from digital news. In reality, most sites are operating at a loss, subsidized by investors, alternative revenue streams, or historic profits from broadcast or print. Those that were aware that digital newspapers are making a loss (10 percent of our sample) are more likely to pay for a news subscription or give a donation. As for why young people are more likely to pay for news, Reuters speculates: Donations may help bridge the gap between paying nothing and an expensive subscription, but they also work better for a generation that likes to access multiple sources on multiple devices. For both these reasons we can expect pay-as-you-go models like donations and crowdfunding to be an increasingly important part of the picture.

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