How Paying for News Influences Civic Health
For the first time in decades, research shows younger people are more inclined than older generations to pay subscriptions for their news.
Writer’s note: This Medium series, How Shifting Media Business Models Influence Local Engagement, has been adapted from my Master’s Thesis at Middle Tennessee State University. For links to other sections and references, see the bottom (and please clap).
Rapid changes in the business models of the news industry have large implications for the way consumers are engaging with news content, and scholarly research must take these changes into account when studying the important relationship between newspaper readership and societal health. This study was designed to look in greater detail at this relationship.
To see the math behind this discussion, click here.
The most significant result of the study is that younger respondents were more likely than older ones to report that they pay for national and local digital newspapers.This result aligns with other metrics across the newspaper industry that millennials are largely driving the growth in national newspaper subscriptions, particularly with digital subscriptions (Schwartz, 2017). Previous research has shown that the decline in print newspaper readership over the last century has been largely generational, with each successive generation reading less print media (Putnam, 2000). The results of this study may suggest the opposite, that younger generations tend to engage with print news more than older generations. If news consumption is indeed a lasting generational habit, this suggests that younger generations will provide a healthier demand for local and national journalism in the future. Because this result conflicts with the previous newspaper consumption habits of prior generations at a younger age, it is likely that engaging with newspapers is a generational trait specific to current generations of young people. Given the historical context that young people of today came of age in a constant state of disruption due to the internet, perhaps younger people have a more innate understanding that the internet makes everything free and quality should be paid for. Modern political upheaval around the world as young people have come of age in the last decades could also have instilled an appreciation for the watchdog of role of journalism to hold power to account.
Additionally, respondents indicated a higher tendency to pay for local digital news than national digital news across all age groups. There are a few possible reasons for this. Perhaps people feel more compelled to pay for news that is connected to their community, or they have a greater understanding for the need for newspapers to continue to have paying subscribers. Local newspapers have intentionally offered subscribers a way to reduce their print consumption and transfer to a digital only subscription, and this strategy may be partially responsible for this result. The higher rate of digital subscriptions for local news may be an echo of behaviors that subscribed to print newspapers in the past. Future research should seek to understand this trend over time, to see if this finding is steady, rising, or falling over time.
While older generations see lower rates of paying for national news, they do have high rates of paid cable news subscriptions. In addition, older generations exhibit less of a positive relationship between paying for news and civic participation. There are a few possible reasons for this. First, for cable news, the reader’s trust as a variable is less important to a media organization’s bottom line than maintaining viewer attention, which perhaps does not lend itself to encouraging civic behavior. Second, older generations have had a longer amount of time to solidify their news consumption and civic participation habits, which might explain why there is less of a correlation between these two factors.
While older generations have a higher tendency to pay for cable news, younger generations are significantly more engaged with streaming services, which are the most popular form of paid media in the study. Streaming services don’t typically have a large catalogue of news shows and networks, so it is possible that younger users are “cutting the cord” and turning to newspapers for their news consumption. There is additional avenue for research here to determine exactly what type of news people are engaging with on each platform.
Newspaper subscriptions correlate with higher rates of civic participation than television viewing, furthering Robert Putnam’s hypothesis in Bowling Alone that television negatively affects American civic life, as well as research showing that newspaper readership positively affects civic participation (McLeod et al., 1999).
The regression model analyzed the degree each variable plays with regard to civic participation score. Notably, when the interaction variable was added to the model, the news attention variable was the largest predictor of civic participation score, accounting for more of an increase in civic participation score than payment alone.
When civic participation scale is broken down by age, the results show that paid media consumption is a bigger predictor of civic participation rates among younger people than older people. Previous research shows that news consumption habits are generational, and these results seem to suggest that the way young people consume media is more important to their civic engagement than older generations. Younger generations, whose media economy has been in a constant state of disruption since they came of age, show a stronger link between these two variables. Older generations, who have had the longest amount of time to formulate habits in both their news engagement and civic engagement scores, see a lesser relationship between these two factors, indicating that the correlating relationship between these two factors decreases as people grow older. Because news consumption habits are typically generational, it can be hypothesized that as these younger generations age, they will provide a more stable source of revenue for news publishers than older generations have. Further research should look at this question over time to determine whether this is a generational trait among younger generations that will stay steady as they age, or if this trend is something limited to younger generations that they grow out of as they age and their media consumption habits become more ingrained.
This research does have a few weaknesses. The first is that it is difficult to determine causality when examining the relationship between paid news behavior and civic engagement rates. Perhaps those who have high civic engagement rates are more likely to pay for news as a way to enhance their understanding of their communities. It is also true that a person who reads news that they trust enough to pay for is likely to have a higher confidence when acting on that information in the public sphere. Because the study is just a snapshot in time, it is difficult to ascertain the difference in life cycle effects and generational effects.
Secondly, the survey asked respondents to self-report their subscriber and media behaviors without using additional methods to verify the accuracy of these claims, such as receipts. It is certainly possible that the way a respondent self-reports media consumption habits differs from the reality of a respondent’s media consumption habits. For example, a user might have a subscription that they are unaware they pay for, perhaps because a subscription auto-renews or is included with another media product.
Additionally, the study is limited to those who participate in online Qualtrics panels, and is not an exact mirror of the US population, as it skewed younger and female, potentially biasing results toward those with an internet connection while ignoring members of the general population who rely on print information. This is potentially a significant limitation, and while the results were statistically significant, there should be some skepticism when applying the results more generally. In this context, statistical significance indicates that random variation, alone, likely could not have produced relationships as intense as those found. Sampling bias could have, though, in part or even in whole, given that the sample is not a random sample of the broader US population. Further research could examine these relationships with a nationally representative sample, and the findings presented here suggest the associated effort and cost might be worthwhile.
Finally, the linear regression model considered in this paper ignores possible interactions involving education and other demographics and offers only a fuzzy glimpse of the interaction between age and subscriber buy-in. Together with the surprising positive correlation between age and subscribing, the results presented here suggest the need for a re-examination of the relationships among demographics, subscribing and civic engagement using a more sophisticated technique such as process modeling, which can test hypotheses about mediation and moderation along the paths that link the outcome variable and its preceding factors (Hayes, 2017).
Future research into this field should look at the persistence of these results across time to better determine whether the relationships found stem from a life cycle effect or a generational effect, and to better understand the historical consequences of media business model disruption.
Prior research in the field indicates that there is an important relationship between the way people consume news and the rate of civic participation in their local communities. In recent decades, there has been a substantial shift from local print newspaper readership toward national digital newspaper readership. Ongoing research should pay attention to how younger generations are engaging with the news, as they appear to have tremendous market power to shape the future of the industry. This study attempts to understand the correlations between the types of news a person pays for and their civic engagement rates, by analyzing this relationship by generation.
The biggest practical takeaway from this study is that younger generations see an increase in engagement with paid forms of newspapers, whether national or local, which corresponds with higher rates of civic participation. Additionally, the results suggest that younger Americans break with tradition when it comes to their paid media consumption habits. Prior research in the field, such as in Robert Putnam’s groundbreaking work Bowling Alone, shows a generational decline in engagement with the news and with civic participation rates. The results of this study indicate that younger generations are more disposed to pay for the news that they consume, and that paying for news correlates with higher rates of civic participation for younger generations than for older generations.
This piece is the final installment of a series called How Shifting Media Business Models Influence Local Engagement. See below for links to other installments of the series.
A Short History of Technological Innovation in the News, click here.
The Social Effects of News Industry Disruption: click here.
For study design and results, click here.
For Citations, click here.
