Survey: Online news consumers have favorites, but little loyalty, and don’t want to pay
By David Bauder, APSunday, March 14, 2010
Survey: Readers don’t want to pay for news online
NEW YORK — A new consumer survey suggests that getting people to pay for news online at this point would be “like trying to force butterflies back into their cocoons.”
That’s one of several bleak headlines in the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s annual assessment of the state of the news industry, released Sunday.
About 35 percent of online news consumers say they have a favorite site that they check each day. There’s little brand loyalty: 82 percent of people with preferred news sites say they’d look elsewhere if their favorites start demanding payment.
For the online survey, the project interviewed 2,259 people from Dec. 28, 2009, to Jan. 19, 2010. The margin of error is plus or minus five percentage points.
On the Net:
www.journalism.org
