What compels Australians to pay for news?
Welcome to Tuesdata, our weekly analysis for Unmade’s paying members.
Below, we explore the findings of a comprehensive global study from Reuters Institute, which includes Australian results, exploring motivations for paying for news subscriptions. We talk to executives from Nine News, The Guardian and Crikey about the findings.
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Has the news industry turned the corner on subscriptions?
More Australians are taking out news subscriptions, and more are reporting feeling a greater sense of trust in the news. Those are the key findings from this year’s Reuters Institute Digital News Report, produced by The University of Canberra.
The study spoke to 93,000 consumers globally, including 2,025 in Australia.
The most remarkable number from the study is that more than one in five Australian consumers (22%) are now paying for news. That’s the third biggest of the 46 countries studied, behind only Norway (39%) and Sweden (33%).
To get a better understanding of what that means to local news business models, we spoke to news executives leading some of the country’s most prominent mastheads - Nine’s managing director of publishing James Chessell, Private Media CEO Will Hayward and The Guardian managing director Dan Stinton.