A new survey from the philanthropy-funded Pew-Knight Initiative has found that nearly half of US residents who don’t pay for local news cite its free availability elsewhere as the main reason.
Only 15% of the survey respondents said they had paid for local news in the past year — approximately the same proportion as in 2018.
A third of the non-payers said they were simply not interested enough in local news to pay for it in the first place.
The Press-Gazette reports the research, titled Americans’ Changing Relationship With Local News, polled a representative sample of 5,146 adults in the US in January 2024 and found that the proportion of Americans who say they follow local news “very closely” has fallen from 37% in 2016 to 22% today.
Among US adults aged 29 or younger this figure was 9%, compared with 35% of people aged 65 and above.
Nonetheless, 85% of respondents said they considered local news outlets at least somewhat important to the wellbeing of their community, with 32% saying they were “very important” and 12% “very important”.
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