Digital Subs Still on the Rise at Most Newspapers

One ray of good news during the Covid pandemic: More U.S. consumers read and subscribed to local news publications, reports The Local News Initiative.

But industry experts feared that rising tide might ebb in 2022 as people headed back to work and inflation began to crimp household budgets. Indeed, there have been signs that readership was falling off. In September, the Poynter Institute for Media Studies reported that pageviews and unique visitors have fallen about 20 percent at local newspaper sites in 2022, a scary metric at a time when costs are rising and traditional advertising revenue continues to fall.

But data from the Medill Subscriber Engagement Index shows that even as the pandemic eased, subscriptions have continued to rise at all three categories of newspapers tracked: large, medium and small.

“The headline is that the bottom has not fallen out,” says Ed Malthouse, the Erastus Otis Haven Professor and Research Director for the Medill IMC Spiegel Research Center at Northwestern University’s Medill School. Malthouse is the data scientist who oversees the Medill Index, which was launched in 2021 and now includes data from more than 100 news organizations around the country.

Among eight large metropolitan dailies surveyed in the top tier of the Index, six showed sizable increases in subscriptions from September 2021 through August 2022. One showed only a small increase and another showed a significant decrease. (Publishers have agreed to contribute their data to the Index with the provision that they are not identified by name.) Medium-sized and smaller publishers also saw an increase although not as great. Meanwhile, reader regularity, the frequency with which readers go online to view news, held steady at all three tiers.

None of that surprises Matt Lindsay, President of Mather Economics, a consulting firm that specializes in media and data analytics. “The number of digital news users during the pandemic went up 30 percent. The [subscriber] conversion ratio went up 50 percent so the total number of starts went up 80 percent,” he says. “We are seeing that pageviews have gone down but publishers are getting better at converting subscribers so they are maintaining their numbers of new subscriptions. There’s been a learning curve and now the big thing is retention and monetization, how to raise the average price that people pay.”

Ken Herts, Chief Operating Officer of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, a nonprofit that owns a stake in the Philadelphia Inquirer, is optimistic that news publishers will be able to hold on to their new subscribers and continue to add to them.

The Inquirer is on track to reach 70,000 digital subscriptions in the near future, exceeding its 61,000 print subscribers. The same trend is apparent at the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. The Boston Globe has reached 240,000 digital subscriptions, about 70 percent of which are full price, roughly $28 a month. In October, the parent of the Dallas Morning News reported a 12.4 percent increase in digital subscribers and an almost 40% jump in digital-only subscription revenue during the third quarter of 2022, even as traffic to the company’s website fell more than 30 percent during the year.