Let’s start with the good news. What types of news stories are most likely to make a reader subscribe on a local newspaper’s website? Is it celebrity news, horoscopes, sports scores, the gardening column? Nope — it’s hard news. Local government, public health, politics — the sort of stuff that makes for a healthy democracy. Those stories are much more likely to turn a reader into a subscriber than the softer stuff.
The bad news? Even those hard news stories don’t convert enough readers to sustain the cost of producing them.
Those findings come out of one of the most remarkable bits of journalism research I’ve ever read — a granular analysis of a newspaper’s web traffic at a scale we’ve never seen before. We’re talking more than 1.2 billion user sessions, covering more than 600 million individual article visits, all of them tied to unique user profiles, over a four-year period. Researchers were able to track each reader’s path — how often they visited, what types of articles drew their attention, and what they did each time they were confronted with a paywall and a decision: offer up a credit card or go find something else to read online.
“I think, at least among people who study communication, the conventional wisdom is that most people are interested in entertainment and sports, only incidentally exposed to politics coverage at all — they don’t really seek it out,” said Gregory J. Martin of Stanford University, the paper’s lead author. “If they get it at all, it’s by accident. That, I think, is kind of the conventional wisdom, both among scholars of journalism as well as among people who actually run newspapers.
“Our paper is making the point that that is basically true — if you look at visits. Those are the sort of articles that generate the most traffic. But willingness to pay in attention is really different than willingness to pay in dollars.”
All of that sounds like good news for those of us who would like local newspapers to protect its most civically useful beats — the “iron core” of journalism — whenever there’s another round of cuts to be had. If your newsroom still lives and dies by Chartbeat — if pageviews are all that matters to management — it’s missing out on some critical intel. The stories that get visits might be the ones you should be doing fewer of if your goal is chasing subscriptions. Smarter newsrooms have known this, at least intellectually, for a while, of course. But here’s hard data proving it.
But what about that bad news? Because Martin et al. have all this data tying reporters to stories to visits to subscriptions, they also have a go at testing whether hiring an additional journalist might even pay for itself. If more local news means more digital subscriptions, could we be at a point where a reporter’s salary might be covered by the extra subscriptions that her work generated? If that were true, it’d be an excellent case for further investment in newsroom capacity.
Unfortunately…it’s not. Even in the most optimistic scenarios, the authors find, one reporter’s digital subscriptions don’t come close to paying one reporter’s salary.
Here’s a chart showing the relative share of a marginal reporter’s salary covered by marginal digital sub revenue. (Note that the researchers don’t have access to this newspaper’s reporters’ actual salaries; they’re using market averages.) Adding a local news reporter will generate digital subscriptions all right — but only enough to cover something like 1/4 of their salary. Even during peak Covid, a health reporter’s digital subs would only cover around 60% or so of their salary.
To be fair, Martin notes that this methodology only accounts for the digital subscription revenue that an individual reporter might generate. Newspapers make money in other ways — from print (somehow!) and from online ads (theoretically!). But neither of those is going in the right direction, and the connection between an individual reporter’s work and revenue is much more abstract. “In a world where newspapers were exclusively online, for the staff, the digital subscriptions alone wouldn’t have covered the the cost, at least during this period,” Martin told me.
So that’s the paper’s central conundrum. If a newsroom wants to optimize for digital subscriptions — which for more than a decade has been the closest approximation of a sustainable business model for high-quality local news — it should lean into hard news. But no matter how hard it leans, the underlying numbers remain dangerously unstable.
- “Editorial” is the strangest beat in the analysis; Martin told me it contained the work of only one opinion staffer who wrote a few times a month. The number of articles that “beat” covers here is so small that I think it’s best ignored as a category.
