Digital News Report


The latest Reuters Institute Digital News Report for 2013, from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, confirms the dominance of digital news, but also of tablets as the core recourse for readers, especially in younger age groups. And it suggests that not only are readers increasingly more prepared to pay for content, but also that tablet readers are even more likely to do this—a comforting sign for writers.

Digital News ReportThe Reuters Institute, “established in autumn 2006, with core funding from the Thomson Reuters Foundation, and part of the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford,” surveys markets worldwide for its Reports, with the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Japan and Denmark covered as well as the U.S.

“What happens in the US does not necessary follow automatically in Europe or elsewhere. Geography, culture, and government policy also play their part, with Germany and France still showing strong allegiance to traditional forms of media,” the Report’s summary notes, which probably helps part explain European eagerness to preserve and protect existing cultural assets.

Tablet takeup is strong across the board, however: “Tablet usage has doubled in the 10 months since the last survey in those countries covered in both 2012 and 2013.” Also, “the key underlying trend is about growth in access from multiple devices. One-third of our entire global sample now gets news on at least two devices and 9% use more than three.”

Digital News Report

Clearly, writers and publishers producing for mobile platforms are working the right territory. Furthermore, the coming generations are unsurprisingly even more favorably disposed towards new and social media, even in conservative markets like Germany, where 58 percent of the Reuters poll still prefer traditional media: “Younger people are more likely to use social media and aggregator brands and in all countries they show a strong preference for online.”

Digital News Report

And in the U.S. especially, “smartphone and tablet users are significantly more likely to pay than other online news users. Even after controlling for the following variables: interest in news, age, gender, education and income, they are on average almost twice as likely to pay as those who don’t use these devices.”

This pattern is less obvious in the UK, indicating that platform brands like the BBC and high-quality apps are key factors, but also, “all four of the countries surveyed for the first time in 2013 show higher percentages of people who have paid for digital news in the last year .”

“The changing attitude towards payment is occurring because it is no longer a novelty, and consumers are expecting more news providers to require payments in the future,” observes Robert G. Picard, Director of Research at the Reuters Institute. Furthermore, “magazines are also finding it easier to get the public to pay than newspapers, especially on tablets, because digital payments for magazines are becoming the norm and they offer news analysis and commentary in ways general news sources do not.”

But critically, “larger legacy news players have advantages when seeking digital payments because brand matters, and only a few large players in each market currently are currently able to produce sufficient numbers of consumers to monetise digital activity well.” That’s a lesson that Amazon has clearly drawn already: The Amazon brand in itself is a factor, as well as the underlying infrastructure, in getting people to pay for the work distributed through its platform.

Based on the developing media consumption habits that this Digital News Report suggests, authors and publishers can conclude that readers will pay for appropriate, valued, and well-presented content. The permafree model doesn’t have to be the default one in future. That said, authors might still need to seek association with either a major platform such as Amazon, or a major publisher, to ensure greater prospects for payment. This is about brand association as well as a ringfenced and paywalled infrastructure.

“The the public is starting to make clear how it wants to use digital media,” concludes Picard. Writers, self-publishers, and publishers all better take note.

The full text of the Report can be downloaded here.

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