Almost all markets we cover in the Digital News Report survey have seen a decline in the use of offline news sources in the last decade. Printed newspapers, radio, and television have all experienced double-digit falls since 2013 in the proportion who say they use them for news on a weekly basis.
As can be seen in Section 3 of this report (Analysis by Country and Market) the picture is broadly consistent across countries with markedly different media systems. Taking just four examples – Brazil, Japan, the UK, and the USA – we can see that newspapers, television, and radio have all seen large declines. And as we document in the Executive summary, even online news websites and apps have seen modest declines, leaving social media and video networks to emerge as the most widely used source, even in markets where they have not experienced growth in recent years.
These trendlines provide an essential guide to changes in news audience behaviour. However, on their own, they have little explanatory power. In short, they tell us how the size of an audience has changed, but they say little about the processes that undermine or sustain that audience.
Why are traditional sources in decline? Why are some traditional sources – like newspapers – declining at a faster rate than, say, television news? Is it because certain sources struggle to attract users in the first place? Or is it perhaps that they are more vulnerable to existing users turning away from them?
These are essential questions for media companies across the world that are still in the process of navigating the digital transition, as offline income still accounts for a substantial part of overall revenues. And they beg further questions for publishers. For example, might it be better for some companies to prioritise retaining existing audiences rather than fruitlessly trying to attract newer, younger ones if new audience recruitment is fundamentally very difficult to do?
This year, to address the question of why traditional sources are in decline, and why some are declining faster than others, we asked respondents basic questions about how they used to get news in the past.
Specifically, we asked respondents who said they had not used a specific source in the last week: (a) whether they used to use it as a source of news on a weekly basis but stopped, or alternatively (b) if they had never used it on a weekly basis. As will be explained in this chapter, these questions help shed light on rates of ‘adoption’ (how many people have ever used a given news source) and rates of ‘retention’ (how many people carry on using a source once they start). And in turn, these may shed some light on what news use might look like in the future, given it seems unlikely that people who have never been socialised into the regular use of sources like print, radio, and television will suddenly start using them for the first time when they get older.
For any given source, respondents can be placed into one of three groups:
1. Current users: those that used a source of news in the last week
2. Lapsed users: those that used to use a source of news on a weekly basis, but have now stopped
3. Never used: those that have never used a source of news on a weekly basis at any point in their lives
Across 45 markets where we asked these follow-up questions, 52% said they currently use TV news on a weekly basis, 27% used to use TV news on a weekly basis, while 14% said they have never used it regularly (7% answered ‘don’t know’ to the follow-up question). As we’ve already seen, fewer people currently use radio news and newspapers on a weekly basis, meaning that larger numbers either never used them in the first place or have lapsed.
We can use these data to compute two further measures: (i) the rate of adoption for a given news source, and (ii) the rate of retention. The rate of adoption refers to the proportion of people who have ever used a source of news on a weekly basis, and is simply the proportion of current users added to the proportion of lapsed users:
Adoption rate = Current users + Lapsed users
The rate of retention is a measure of how many of those who adopted a news source are still using it, and is the proportion of current users divided by the rate of adoption:
Retention rate = Current users / Adoption rate
When we compute these measures for different sources we see that television news as a source has a high rate of ‘adoption’ – because 79% across 45 markets either currently use it on a weekly basis or used to in the past (52% current users + 27% lapsed users). What’s more, television news has also been able to retain many of the people in this group, giving it a relatively high level of ‘retention’ – 66% of the 79% that adopted it are still using it.
In contrast, the adoption rate has been lower for newspapers (49%) and radio news (53%), with only around half the current population ever using them on a weekly basis. And they have both been less sticky, with most adopters having lapsed, meaning that retention levels are at 39% for radio news and 27% for newspapers. Put differently, they have lost most of their living userbase.
These new measures start to tell us more about what’s driving the trendlines from the beginning of the chapter – and point to different reasons for the audience declines we have seen in recent years. The decline in newspaper use is driven by a combination of weak adoption and weak retention. The same is true for radio news – it has a similarly weak adoption rate to newspapers but is a little better at retaining users. Therefore, declines in radio news use are primarily down to weak adoption rates, but made worse by poor retention. In contrast, the declines in television news are primarily driven by the failure to retain audiences. Television has a very high adoption rate and, although it has a better retention rate than other sources, it still means that the main reason people do not currently use TV news is because they gave up on it, not because they never started.
If we split this table by age, we can start to see how this pattern changes for younger people – which in turn suggests how the overall picture might change over time. When we compare the 18–34s to the people 35 and over, we see that the newspaper adoption rate is even lower among younger people (37%), while retention rates are similarly low for both young and old. Both adoption rates and retention rates are lower for radio news among the 18–34s, which means for younger people it has a similar profile to newspapers – and faces the prospect of low adoption compounded by low retention.
However, the most significant age gap is for TV news retention. While TV news has been relatively good at retaining users who are currently aged 35 or over (71%), it has only retained about half of those aged 18–34 (51%). Adoption rates are also lower for television news among the 18–34s (72%), but the gap between them and the older group is smaller than for retention. Taken together, this means that declines in television news use are being driven more by its failure to hold on to younger users than its ability to attract them in the first place.
Up to now we have only considered offline sources, but online news websites and apps are also in decline in many countries across the world. Overall, news websites and apps have a similar adoption/retention profile to television news, with high levels of adoption (71%) and declines primarily driven by a failure to retain audiences. When we split data by age, we see identical rates of adoption for the 18–34s and the 35 and overs, but retention rates are 10pp lower among younger people. Therefore, as with television news, declines in the use of news websites and apps are being driven by the loss of younger former users.
Conclusion
In this chapter we have explained the dynamics behind the declines in audiences for traditional news media. Although the reach of newspapers, television news, and radio news have all declined since 2013, the underlying dynamics of these declines are fundamentally different. This matters for publishers because, as many devote time and energy to developing their ‘young audiences strategy’, they may encounter a tension between focus on retention and a focus on adoption.
While newspapers are experiencing a deep structural decline driven by a combination of low adoption rates and low retention rates, for radio news, low adoption is the more salient factor. In contrast, for television news, the problem is one of retention. Although most people have been weekly consumers of television news at some point in their lives, many have lapsed, with declines driven by the failure to retain younger audiences in particular. In this sense, television news has faded out of use for many people, whereas newspapers and radio news may never have been part of the picture in the first place.
Today’s younger adults will eventually grow older, but the data suggest that they are unlikely to grow into the media habits of their parents’ generation. Older people do not consume more traditional media simply because of their age but because their generation was socialised into specific consumption patterns and preferences. The data show that – in the case of newspapers and radio – relatively few young people have been socialised into these consumption habits in the first place. The social reproduction of newspaper and radio news audiences may have broken down altogether. And although many young people have acquired the television news consumption habit, there are clear signs that this habit is proving less durable than it was for older groups.
What alternatives will people turn to after their usage of a source has lapsed? Unfortunately, this is not a question we can answer with our cross-sectional data. However, it is worth noting that it presumes that people always substitute one source for another. This isn’t necessarily the case. While social media and video networks are emerging as the most widely used news source in many parts of the world, this is driven less by growth and more by the decline in the use of other sources. People may be content to simply carry on with a smaller news repertoire and, for a smaller minority, stepping away from a source may mean that they opt out of news altogether. Among the group that say they used to use TV news on a weekly basis but stopped, 9% say they no longer use any of the sources we asked about – which includes print, radio, podcasts, social media, AI chatbots, and the websites or apps of a variety of different types of news publisher.
This is part of a trend we have documented in previous reports, whereby a small but significant minority in every country say they do not use any news sources at all. It points to the structural decline of news use in general, and not just the rise and fall of specific sources. The idea that a source like television news could be adopted by 80% of the public is, in a sense, quite remarkable – and at its peak, the number was likely even higher. Will another news source ever be so widely adopted again?