The news media’s transition to digital platforms has brought major upheaval to the industry, including a multitude of new providers and ways to get news. And just as news organizations have had to reevaluate their business models, researchers trying to measure public news consumption need to reexamine the traditional ways they’ve done so. In this session, Director of Journalism Research Amy Mitchell will discuss the Center’s methodological study examining how best to measure news consumption in the digital era.

Key takeaways include:
Americans are familiar with newer digital platforms, but few use them for news, limiting the topics researchers can reasonably ask about in surveys. The June survey finds that while U.S. adults are broadly familiar with five newer digital technologies asked about in the survey (streaming devices, internet streaming services, push notifications and alerts, smart speakers, smartwatches), few say they use them regularly for news consumption, and results from the cognitive interviews suggest that many don’t even think of these platforms as ways to get news.

Only 9% of U.S. adults are “very confident” they can tell if a news organization does its own reporting, though just over half (55%) say they are at least “pretty confident.” When asked whether six sources do their own news reporting (ABC News, Wall Street Journal, HuffPost, Google News, Apple News and Facebook), nearly a quarter of U.S. adults (23%) could not identify correctly whether any of the six sources do so.

When asking respondents whether they pay for news, survey researchers need to carefully specify what they mean in an era of changing media business models. For example, when asked a general question, “In the past year, have you paid for news?” most Americans (83%) say they have not paid for news. More specific questions, however, reveal that this seemingly straightforward question does not capture the full range of how Americans pay for news. When asked a specific follow up question about whether they had paid for a “subscription to a newspaper, magazine, or news website” or “donation to a public broadcaster or other news organization,” some Americans who said no to the initial question about paying for news reported that they or their household actually had paid for news in one of these ways.

While there is no “silver bullet” for perfect survey measures of news consumption, the split-form survey experiments reveal that a series of refinements could drive marginal improvements, such as around the goal of reducing overreporting of news consumption. Some changes do not affect overall measures of news consumption, but may make important differences for measuring consumption of specific platforms. The study tested a number of concepts including adding a reference period when asking about news consumption frequency. For instance, adding a specific reference period appears to get more accurate measures of radio consumption (e.g., asking how many days respondents got news from public radio “in the past week” vs. “in a typical week”)