The Digital News Report 2023 looks at the sources people use to inform themselves about their finances and the extent to which different groups find this information easy or difficult to understand. The report found that many people have been rethinking how much they can afford to spend on news media. It conducted detailed qualitative research in the UK, US, and Germany with consumers who have cancelled, maintained, and started subscriptions in the last year to understand the underlying motivations for signing up, as well as key barriers.

• Structural shifts towards more digital, mobile, and platform-dominated media environments have been accelerated by various shocks of the last few years.
• Only 22% of respondents prefer to start their news journeys with a website or app, down 10 percentage points since 2018. Younger groups prefer to access news via side-door routes such as social media, search, or mobile aggregators.
• Facebook's influence on journalism is declining as it shifts its focus away from news and faces new challenges from YouTube and TikTok.
• Audiences pay more attention to celebrities, influencers, and social media personalities than journalists in networks like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat, contrasting with Facebook and Twitter.
• Less than a third (30%) of the public believe that having stories selected for them on the basis of previous consumption is a good way to get news.
• Fewer people are now participating in online news than in the recent past, with only around a fifth (22%) being active participators across markets.
• Trust in the news has fallen by a further 2 percentage points in the last year, with only four in ten of the total sample (40%) trusting most news most of the time.
• Public media brands have high levels of trust in many Northern European countries, but reach has been declining with younger audiences.
• Consumption of traditional media continues to fall in most markets, with online and social consumption not making up the gap. Fewer than half (48%) of the aggregate sample are very or extremely interested in news, down from 63% in 2017.
• 36% of news consumers across markets avoid the news, often or sometimes, with news avoiders being more interested in positive or solutions-based journalism and less interested in the big stories of the day.
• 17% of people across a basket of 20 richer countries paid for any online news, with Norway having the highest proportion (39%) and Japan and the UK having the lowest (9%). Cost of living or high price was cited most often as a reason for cancelling subscriptions in the last year.
• A large proportion of digital subscriptions go to just a few upmarket national brands but in some countries, the majority of those paying take out more than one subscription.
• Across countries, the majority of online users still prefer to read the news rather than watch or listen to it, but in some countries like the Philippines and Thailand, respondents now prefer video to text.
• News podcasting remains a minority activity overall, with around a third (34%) accessing a podcast monthly, and deep dive podcasts and extended chat shows being the most widely consumed across markets.

For the full reports visit eutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk.