Earlier this year, I wrote about the demand problem for local news. This is especially true for young audiences, which as the Pew Research Center reported in May 2024 only 9% of Americans 18 to 29 follow local news very closely. People with higher levels of education are less likely to follow local news. It doesn’t matter whether the Americans are Democrats or Republicans, neither groups follow local news particularly well.
Surveys show a disconnect between the value people say they put on local news, their interest in and their propensity to pay. Americans say that local news is important. “Eighty-five percent of U.S. adults say that local news outlets “are at least somewhat important to the well-being of their local community,” including 44% who say they’re “extremely” or “very” important,” a Pew-Knight study found. However, they are reading it less, and only 15% of Americans have paid for it. But, that’s far better than the 8% of people in the UK. The research describes the contradictions, but it doesn’t say why. It doesn’t simply seem to be due to the sources of information that people have. Yes, audiences are getting more of their news from social media but that doesn’t address why people are consuming less local news and why a fundamental contradiction exists between the importance they place on local news and their actual consumption and support of it.
Fortunately, people who are grappling with these issues with news at several levels. I connected with Julia Gitis, a civic tech entrepreneur, through the News Product Alliance. In the summer of 2022, she noticed the old newspaper vending machines had been removed from her neighbourhood. “(She) was even more convinced that having a modern and digital version of the news racks would help people in San Francisco engage with their communities,” she wrote. Her vision is to create a neighbourhood digital bulletin boards “to strengthen democracy and civic engagement”. Julia told me that people were more interested in local events and sharing information about their pets. Other feedback includes a desire for art from local artists, community resources and interactive games.
They recently hosted a listening session with community members to give them a hands-on experience with their first digital prototype and to understand their local news needs. Their findings? "Residents like local news more in theory than in practice." They don’t use the local news section of their prototype that much, and they found some level of news avoidance in their listening session. “One resident told us ‘The news is so troubling lately, I feel like I need to escape,’ a sentiment echoed by many people we spoke to.” They also received feedback about content features they hadn’t tought of including promotions for neighbourhood businesses and local classified ads for things like dog walking and other hyper-local services. It shows that even in San Francisco, the centre of digital disruption, there is still room to make money from marketing local services.
This is great open on-the-ground testing of local news needs, and I love how Julia and her collaborators are co-creating a local news solution, not only in terms of hardware but also in terms of partnering with local businesses, schools and other stakeholders. I also like the honesty about the results. Local news was the original goal, but communities are expressing a broader range of local information needs.
The model that Julia is testing is interesting. It’s not so much a news source as it is a novel model of distribution. (If you’re looking for novel models for news sources, check out LION Publishers’ growing roster.) She has placed importance on the fact that it is in a public place, which again is a different model. It’s also unlike the large screens we have in major rail stations in Europe, which are passive. These screens are interactive and on ground level amongst people.
The kind of on-the-ground research that Julia is doing is fascinating, and it reminds me of the research in Medill Survey of local news consumption in Chicago. Product managers always ask why, and I will keep my eye out for additional research that asks why. And in the market research that I’m responsible for, I’m going to be asking more why questions.
And now onto the links for the week.
Americans go to the polls in person on Tuesday 5 November, although 75m US voters have already cast their ballots, which is 48% of the number of votes cast in the 2020 election. To endorse or not to endorse has been quite a controversy in the US. Both the LA Times and Washington Post opting not to, and both papers have paid dearly for it. The Washington Post has lost a quarter of a million subscribers for owner Jeff Bezos decision, and it has renewed criticisms about CEO Will Lewis which had died down. The Guardian spotted an opportunity to win over American readers looking for a paper to support and took advantage of it. It shows how the age of reader revenue (subscriptions and membership) changes the dynamic between audiences and the publications they pay for.
The UK government is floating ideas similar to Canada and Australia that local news providers should be compensated by the platforms for their content that appears on platforms. Platforms have a mixed record in their response to this legislation. In Canada, it led to local publishers being delisted with punishing results for small, independent publishers.
With major publishers striking deals with OpenAI and others to licence their content to train AI platforms, there is another player in the space to act as a middleman.
My friend, Janne Rygh, an Editorial Content Developer at Amedia, is leading an initiative to engage younger readers and convert them to subscribers. 87% of pageviews come from registered users, which as Janne says means they know a lot more about their audience and what they are doing. That’s great, but despite this excellent shift from anonymous to known users, their subscribers overall are aging. Nearly half of their subscribers are older than 60. It took some convincing of senior stakeholders, but Janne got the green light to trial efforts at two of Amedia’s 130 newspapers. Some of this isn’t too revolutionary: To engage young readers, you have to write about them. They also uncovered topics they needed to write about including early education (Kindergarten), personal economics issues (wallet issues) as well as health and family life.
Interestingly, INMA has new report out that Gen Z might be into print. They want non-digital experiences, and hey, if vinyl and cassettes can make a comeback, I guess print can too.
