Younger audiences drive decline in television news use

Television news audience declines have been driven primarily by a failure to retain viewers, particularly younger adults, according to an analysis from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

The analysis, published June 16 as part of the “Digital News Report,” examined news consumption across 45 markets. It distinguished between current users, people who previously used a news source weekly and those who had never used it regularly.

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Across the markets studied, 52% of respondents said they currently used television news weekly, while 27% said they had previously done so but stopped. An additional 14% said they had never used television news regularly.

Those figures gave television news an adoption rate of 79%, meaning nearly four in five respondents had used it weekly at some point. Its retention rate was 66%, higher than those of radio news and newspapers.

The report found a sharper retention gap among younger adults. Television news retained 51% of users ages 18 to 34, compared with 71% of those 35 and older.

“We can see that the decline in TV news use is not really about young people having never adopted the medium. It’s really about young people who used to use it but have now stopped,” said Richard Fletcher, director of research at the Reuters Institute, on the institute’s “Future of Journalism” podcast.

Adoption among younger adults remained comparatively high at 72%, suggesting that many had established a television news habit but later abandoned it.

Newspapers faced a different problem. Their overall adoption rate was 49% and their retention rate was 27%, indicating that audience decline was tied to both limited adoption and a loss of existing users.

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Radio news had an adoption rate of 53% and a retention rate of 39%. The analysis said weak adoption was the main factor behind its decline, compounded by poor retention.

News websites and apps showed a pattern similar to television. They recorded a 71% adoption rate, but retention among adults ages 18 to 34 was 10 percentage points lower than among older users.

The findings suggested that younger adults were unlikely to adopt the traditional media habits of previous generations as they aged. Newspapers and radio may face particular difficulty because relatively few younger consumers have used them regularly.

The analysis also cautioned that people who stop using one news source do not necessarily replace it with another. Among former weekly television news users, 9% said they no longer used any of the news sources included in the survey.

“Where there’s uncertainty is not about the decline of certain sources. It’s about what, if anything, will take its place,” Fletcher said.