Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
There’s another reason the L.A. Times’ AI-generated opinion ratings are bad (this one doesn’t involve the Klan)
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
Oct. 19, 2018, 12:12 p.m.
Audience & Social

If you’re poor in the UK you get less, worse news — especially online, new research suggests

Poorer people are less likely to go straight to a news site, and the researchers found no online news brand that was read by significantly more poorer people than wealthier people.

News is more unevenly distributed in the UK than income is, according to new research from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Antonis Kalogeropoulos and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen found that poorer people consume less news than wealthier people and that the difference is particularly pronounced online, where poorer people are less likely to go directly to news sites for content.

“Whereas higher social grade individuals and lower social grade individuals use the same number of sources offline on average, lower social grade individuals use significantly fewer online sources on average,” the authors write.

This is in the United Kingdom, land of the great equalizer the BBC, which reaches a whopping 92 percent of UK adults. There is no media company in the U.S. that comes close. Income inequality is also higher in the United States than in the United Kingdom. In other words: This study focuses on the UK but the problem is likely the same or worse in the U.S.

One big difference in income groups in the U.K. is the types of news that they access online. “Lower social grade individuals are significantly less likely to go direct to news providers, whereas lower and higher social grade individuals are equally likely to rely on distributed forms of discovery (relying on social media, search engines, and the like),” the authors write.

There was also “no online news brand among the 32 included in the survey that had significantly more users from lower social grades.”

“In principle, most journalists would like news to reach everybody more or less equally, irrespective of social grade,” the authors write. “Despite the ease of accessing news online, today, that is clearly not happening.” And as publishers increasingly move toward subscription-based models, where only people who can pay get full access, the problem is likely to get worse.

“Swapping mass for niche media means there are plenty of top-notch news outlets targeting well-off, highly educated people, or demographically appealing young people,” our Josh Benton wrote last year, “but fewer targeting everybody else.”

Laura Hazard Owen is the editor of Nieman Lab. You can reach her via email (laura@niemanlab.org) or Bluesky DM.
POSTED     Oct. 19, 2018, 12:12 p.m.
SEE MORE ON Audience & Social
Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
There’s another reason the L.A. Times’ AI-generated opinion ratings are bad (this one doesn’t involve the Klan)
At a time of increasing polarization and rigid ideologies, the L.A. Times has decided it wants to make its opinion pieces less persuasive to readers by increasing the cost of changing your mind.
The NBA’s next big insider may be an outsider
While insiders typically work for established media companies like ESPN, Jake Fischer operates out of his Brooklyn apartment and publishes scoops behind a paywall on Substack. It’s not even his own Substack.
Wired’s un-paywalling of stories built on public data is a reminder of its role in the information ecosystem
Trump’s wholesale destruction of the information-generating sectors of the federal government will have implications that go far beyond .gov domains.