Study: Why People Cancel News Subscriptions

The folks at Nieman Lab recently wondered how many people actually went ahead with their threats to cancel news subscriptions.

Public data on cancellations is sparse. It’s not something that news organizations like sharing. It can also be surprisingly annoying to cancel news subscriptions online, often requiring an actual call to customer service.

So they asked their readers for their most recent cancellation stories, and received over 500 responses.

Many of their respondents alluded to paying for more than one news subscription, which is not the norm. (2017 data suggests that about half of Americans pay for some kind of news, including making donations to public radio.) Only about one in five Americans pays for online news, according to the most recent data from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.) 

Here’s what was found in the survey. Click here to read all of the responses grouped by outlet, and stay tuned for an upcoming story on possible solutions to some of the problems mentioned here.

The New York Times accounted for nearly a quarter of all the cancellations in our survey, which probably isn’t surprising since it is also the largest newspaper in the U.S. Here are the most-canceled outlets in the survey, with “local newspapers” (including large local newspapers like the Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, and Chicago Tribune, as well as smaller ones) combined in one category.

The No. 1 reason people say they cancel a subscription is money… Nearly a third of respondents — 31% — cited money as the primary reason they canceled a subscription. Some people canceled when promotional rates expired; others were irritated that subscriptions auto-renewed or that news organizations weren’t transparent about price. Respondents cited a lack of funds, often due to the Covid-19 pandemic and related income loss, as another reason for cancelling subscription. Some of those were folks who had multiple subscriptions and had to choose to cut back on one or more publications to help make ends meet. Others will seek promotional offers to the end.

…followed closely by ideology or politics. Thirty percent of respondents said that they canceled the news subscription due to ideology or politics. The publications that were most often implicated in this line of reasoning were The New York Times and The Washington Post, but other publications weren’t exempt. Many were not happy that James Bennett, the Times’ former opinion editor, chose to publish Senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed calling for the military to quash Black Lives Matter protests; others were only upset that the Times had apologized. Bret Stephens and Maggie Haberman got name-checked multiple times, as did, of course, Donald Trump.

After that, there were a myriad other reasons for canceling.