ThinkNewsBrands states that media coverage of the University of Canberra’s 2024 Digital News Report has painted a bleak picture of the Australian news industry, despite the report showing the opposite to be true.
The organisation said the coverage focused on a rise in “news fatigue” and in people who “avoid the news” and while the results are understandable “given the febrile nature of the world in recent years”, they are at odds with the expressed behaviours the report reveals.
The report shows over half of Australians (51%) are accessing news more than once a day, a 3pp increase from last year.
News consumption among Baby Boomers has also seen a substantial increase (7pp) since last year. Heavy news consumption was strong among women and Gen Z who increased by 5pp respectively.
While consumption of national newspapers remained stable, regional and local newspapers rose.
The report showed that the proportion of people paying for online news dropped by 1pp to 21% and ongoing subscriptions remained stable at 11%.
ThinkNewsBrands says this is a strong result given the cost-of-living crisis and shows the value Australians place in news.
By comparison, according to National Australia Bank data, 37% of Australians have cut back on a streaming service in the past three months and 33% have trimmed spending on subscriptions for magazines, apps and other goods and products.
ThinkNewsBrands CEO, Vanessa Lyons told Mediaweek that a closer look at the data tells a much happier story than media coverage would suggest.
“Despite not being widely reported, the rising consumption numbers are actually the most important. They give a much more accurate read on the growing demand for news and its unyielding power as an ad medium. The report also shows that written news, as a combination of digital and print sources, is the most preferred news format with 70 per cent of study participants saying they had read news in the past week.
“People want to stay up to date with what’s important to them and they do that through news. And the fact is that the world never sleeps so there’s always new content that people want to connect with. That will never change, no matter the generation, decade or economic conditions and this is what makes news so resilient and such a sure thing for advertisers,” Lyons added.
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