University of Texas scholar Iris Chyi has been saying for more than a decade that digital news reports are an “inferior good” to a daily print summary and largely fail to draw a paying audience or advertising. Memorably, she called digital the “ramen noodles” of journalism — food for news seekers, but food that is not especially nourishing or appealing.
Her latest study does not recant but aims to explore making the best of digital, even if big financial challenges remain. She first set out to see whether the two years of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a surge of paid digital subscriptions. Her answer: At the 18 large papers studied, yes, the data shows that. But the bounce faded once the health crisis, with its many newsworthy local variations, receded.
The second leg of the paper looked at comparative pricing. The rates for digital subscriptions remain steady and low, Chyi argued, but the cost of all-access print subscriptions has soared, in many cases to more than $1,000 a year. In effect, newspapers are running their print subscribers off, hoping to convert at least some of them to paying for digital rather than dropping the news report altogether.
“She has a point,” Dean Ridings, executive director of the America’s Newspapers association, told me. With the potential news audience growing younger year by year, he said, “everyone is aware of the need to transition. … The issue is how to monetize that.”
