A few years back, German publisher Spiegel decided to try something new: A cheaper Spiegel+ digital subscription just for readers under 30. It’s €2.99 per week, compared to €4.99 per week for readers over 30.

At around €12 a month, though, Spiegel+ for the young is still more expensive than the basic German Netflix subscription (€7.99 per month). A new study from Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism examines how people in three countries are thinking about paying for news subscriptions, especially in the context of other entertainment they pay for. The study, by Nic Newman and Dr. Craig T. Robertson, draws on data from RISJ’s 2023 Digital News Report and also includes qualitative interviews with 110 participants from the U.S., U.K., and Germany.

Some interesting bits from the study:

— Across 20 countries, an average of 17% of people paid for any online news (via either subscription or donation) in 2023.

In 2014, the vast majority of subscriptions were for print — with digital sold as an added benefit — but today the biggest proportion are ongoing digital subscriptions of different types (46%), with around three in 10 (28%) paying for combined print and digital packages. A significant proportion (34%) have a subscription paid for by someone else, for example a parent or educational institution, or where news is bundled as part of a wider TV, broadband, or mobile deal. Just over one in 10 (12%) of those paying say they made a one-off or ongoing donation to a news service in the last year).

— Germany is unusual in having a tabloid newspaper, Bild, that successfully charges for content:

It is one of many publishers in Germany to use a “freemium (+)” model, charging €7.99 per month (or €1.99 for the first year) for exclusive news and entertainment content, packaged with video highlights from the Bundesliga.

BildPLUS has around 675,000 digital subscribers, which explains the higher-than-usual proportion of subscribers with lower income/education in our German data, when compared with the US and the UK.

(That 675,000 subscribers is significant in a country where only 11% of people pay for online news.)

— People think a lot about whether news subscriptions are “worth it” and whether they’re using them enough. Streaming subscriptions may not receive the same scrutiny:

“We have Disney+, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime, currently HBO Max and Spotify, Kocowa, and BritBox. I used to have The Washington Post but it got too expensive to have all the subscriptions. We change our subscriptions up every so often to avoid paying for things we’re not using.” — F, 29, U.S., lapsed subscriber

“News is as important as anything, but if I were to cut one, I would first think of cutting my news subscription before any other.” — M, 29, U.S., new subscriber

The study’s authors note that, in addition to the “often negative and downbeat nature of news consumption,” people may consider how many members of their household benefit from each subscription: “News subscriptions sometimes compare unfavorably because they tend to be valuable to just one person in the household.”

— Younger people and older people may also simply have different reference points for what the price of news should be. Compared to a print newspaper subscription, a digital newspaper subscription is inexpensive; compared to a streaming subscription, a digital newspaper subscription is expensive.

Our sample is not large enough to come to definitive conclusions, but the role played by reference pricing from streaming services seems to be more important when it comes to younger subscribers. Some older consumers appear more influenced by the price of offline services they had paid for in the past, such as a print subscription. In that context, an online news subscription can often feel like a bargain.

“The print version [Arizona Republic], which used to be delivered to my house ‘almost’ every morning, costs over $50 a month. I consider the digital version a bargain. Also, my digital subscription isn’t killing any trees.” — M, 79, U.S, maintained subscriber

“If publishers could find a way to charge on the basis of perceived value,” the authors write, “many more people could become subscribers over time.”

You can read the full study, “Paying for news: Price-conscious consumers look for value amid cost-of-living crisis,” here.

When The City launched in 2019, it was a nonprofit beacon of hope for local news in NYC at a time when for-profit outlets were shrinking and shutting down. In its 2019 annual report, The City acknowledged that it had “received extraordinary launch support from lead founding donors the Charles H. Reason Foundation, the Leon Levy Foundation, and Craig Newmark Philanthropies and its distinguished board.”

Less than five years later, that support has ebbed, making The City the latest well-respected nonprofit newsroom forced to cut costs to keep going. As Semafor’s Max Tani reported Wednesday evening:

One person with knowledge of the situation told Semafor that funding had dropped by at least $1.5 million this year, a significant decrease for the local operation. In 2021, the City reported that it brought in just over $7.5 million in contributions.

Major donors have reduced funding or abstained from giving altogether. One of the biggest donors to The City, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, dialed its support down to just $10,000, a significant drop from the millions it had committed in past years. The Ford Foundation did not renew its grant for the City at all this year.

Tani noted that The City averted layoffs by cutting work hours by 20% “to take advantage of the New York State [Shared Work program], which allows employees to be partially compensated by applying for state unemployment with New York.”

New: New York nonprofit newsroom The City has seen a major drop in support from donors, including the Ford Foundation and Craig Newmark. The organization and staff reached an agreement for employees to take a 20% work hour reduction. https://t.co/dUDZEnTSJI

— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) September 21, 2023

Those cuts are happening despite The City’s audience growing by 33% this year, according to The City’s executive director Nicholas Dawes. Dawes’ statement to Tani that nonprofit journalism is “not exempt from the forces affecting philanthropy and the wider media sector” echoed the concerns raised by former Washington Post executive editor and Knight Foundation board member Marty Baron in an interview last month, when he commented that “nonprofits are not immune from business considerations. It’s not like being a nonprofit immunizes you from having to make enough money in order to pay people’s salaries and to invest in the future, to invest in the technology that’s necessary and make the other necessary investments in the future.”

Recent research suggested that there is more funding going toward both for-profit and non-profit newsrooms. But in his reporting about The City, Tani ended with an observation that raises bigger questions about the nonprofit news model — its growing prevalence seems to be making philanthropy more of a zero-sum game:

Nonprofit news organizations have also run up against the success of their own model. Multiple nonprofit news insiders told Semafor that the increasing number of news nonprofits has outpaced the money available from donors, creating a competition for a limited pool of money.

Local news has been a five-alarm fire for a long time. But nonprofit news has been widely touted, and pursued, as the model to help put it out. Most recently, more than 20 organizations recently joined forces to announce the Press Forward initiative, which aims to invest at least $500 million into the local news ecosystem (including for-profit and non-profit outlets alike) over the next five years. Funding cuts at organizations like The Texas Tribune and The City illustrate just how dire the need for capital is for news nonprofits while highlighting a troubling bigger-picture problem: Financial sustainability still eludes even high-powered, relatively high-profile local news nonprofits.

The Ford Foundation, which chose not to renew its grant to The City, is a founding Press Forward coalition partner. “In 2021, the Ford Foundation supported The City with a one-time grant through our Social Bond offering, a special initiative which was intended to support organizations’ immediate funding needs due to the pandemic,” Lolly Bowean, The Ford Foundation’s program officer for journalism (and a 2017 Nieman Fellow), told me in an email. “This grant term completed its cycle, and is not related to the recent announcement of our support for Press Forward.” She added:

The Ford Foundation is committed to supporting local and national journalism, especially that which uplifts and sheds light on the lived realities of underrepresented groups. Our existing journalism strategy – and our support for Press Forward – reflects our commitment to support local journalism, re-center local news, and close the longstanding inequities that exist in journalism’s coverage and practice today.

The City’s cost cuts have attracted attention across the news industry:

The crisis of nonprofit local news outlets is especially bleak because lots of industry experts had hoped this model would be the solution to dying newspapers. If you’re a civic-minded person with money to spend, please consider supporting these places. https://t.co/6QMjmCIelg

— McKay Coppins (@mckaycoppins) September 21, 2023

It’s been a tough year for media, including nonprofit media. ⁦@THECITYNY⁩ covers my hometown with courage and insight. I proudly support this newsroom, its journalists and its leaders ⁦@NicDawes⁩ ⁦@RichardKimNYC⁩. You should too! https://t.co/EO00lSZKsF

— Sewell Chan (@sewellchan) September 21, 2023

the market – philanthropy included – will not support the information ecosystem required of a healthy American democracy. https://t.co/vGbJt9OSMH

— Wesley (@WesleyLowery) September 21, 2023

https://t.co/rdKpKBjvxs https://t.co/mApLfPsUpu

— Jesse Holcomb (@JesseHolcomb) September 21, 2023

It is an outrage that in a city this rich, with this many problems, there aren’t more wealthy people willing to support local public service journalism. But it also demonstrates that billionaires will not save local journalism – we are going to have to find another way. https://t.co/7ZJ3AFTgH9

— Lydia Polgreen (@lpolgreen) September 21, 2023

All these situations are unique.
If this key sentence- “Large and small funders have reduced donations significantly to news nonprofits across the country this year.”— means on net basis across the sector, not sure the facts bear it out. Evidence? https://t.co/3WDe2qVy24

— Richard Tofel (@dicktofel) September 21, 2023

A few years ago, Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro and Jesse Holcomb wrote a Nieman Lab 2020 journalism prediction that has aged well, for better or worse: “Local news initiatives [will] run into a capital shortage.” Among their five scenarios for possible sources of growth capital and “unintended consequences of growth in non-commercial news” in the face of that challenge, one in particular sounds familiar today: “A big, coordinated play by philanthropic leaders to boost production of noncommercial news.” But in that prediction, they caution:

Even with a game-changing funding renaissance in local news (which would require the significant participation of community foundations), it probably won’t be fast enough or big enough to refill the bucket as local newspaper talent and jobs continue to drain away. There may not be enough philanthropic capital, even on the sidelines, to support the scope and depth of local news-gathering that our democracy requires.

On Wednesday, The Guardian launched its fifth digital edition, Guardian Europe, which joins the paper’s U.K., U.S., Australian, and international editions.

Why Europe? A release offers a few reasons:

The Guardian’s European audience is its third largest after the UK and the US, with recurring digital support from the continent seeing steady growth; three and half times larger than it was in 2016. European readers are now the Guardian’s most engaged audience group outside of the UK, with over 250 million page views from Europe last year (up 129% vs. 2016) and nearly 25 million monthly unique browsers (up 41% vs. 2016)….Traffic from outside of the UK now represents around two-thirds of the Guardian’s total digital audience.

In 2020, journalist Casey Newton left The Verge to launch Platformer, a tech news–focused Substack. We previously ran Newton’s wrap-ups of the first and second years of striking out on his own. He just published year 3. Platformer now has two full-time employees — Newton and managing editor Zoë Schiffer — and one part-timer, Lindsey Choo.)

Back in 2021, Newton wrote, “The only way a Substack grows is through tweets. I am like 85% serious when I say this.” Fast-forward to 2023, though, and:

[In] some ways it really is harder to start your own publication today than it was in 2020 — there’s more competition for subscription dollars, for one. And thanks to the death of Twitter, it’s harder to promote your work: you wind up posting the same link to five or six new networks, and collectively get a tenth of the views that a year ago you could have gotten on the bird site.

But lately, wherever I go, I’m telling everyone from the youngest journalism students to the most established veterans to start a little newsletter. You only have to send it out a few times a year if you want, I tell them. Just email friends links to your stories. Maybe throw in a few thoughts about your beat, or links to other things you thought were interesting. And let that list grow over time.

Also:

I’m confident that Google will find ways to continue directing streams of traffic to publishers out of sheer self-preservation — the company already faces an antitrust trial over its monopolistic digital advertising business, and if a handful more large digital media companies collapse in the next two years, regulators will have even more ammunition for their lawsuits.

But I don’t know anyone who thinks that the terms for digital publishers reliant on search traffic are going to change for the better. And if you’re a reporter for one of those publishers, you should assume that the pace of layoffs is going to pick up faster than your boss will be able to create new revenue streams to pay your salary.

The defensive reason to strike out on your own, then, is that someday the choice might be made for you. (I won’t soon forget the conversation I had earlier this year with a media CEO who, when I asked which publications he thought would survive the disruption from generative AI, would not name more than five.)

And ads are coming to Platformer:

Over the next year, Platformer is going to experiment with putting ads in the newsletter. Platformer was designed so that most people never have to pay us in order to benefit from our journalism. But at the moment, around 95 percent of our audience falls into this category. And while the generosity of our paid readers has allowed us to grow revenue well beyond my expectations, the limits of the subscription model mean that at our current rate we would likely never be able to bring on another journalist.

Ever since the newsletter began, we’ve gotten inquiries from advertisers about inserting ads into the newsletter. We briefly experimented with a jobs board last year, but discontinued it for lack of interest. This year, we want to see whether we can build a meaningful ad business that could support another journalism job.

I’m the sort of person who pays to remove ads when I can, and so I promise you that we are going to move very cautiously here. We’ll start with one ad in the weekly free edition and see how it feels. It will take us some time to ramp up — we need to publish an ads policy, for example, and chat with potential sponsors — but if you have thoughts on the subject in the meantime, let us know. (Especially if you want to advertise!)

Finally, I continue to think about what else I and Platformer can do to support independent journalism. Maybe someday the newsletter begins making small, angel-style investments in promising journalists who want to start their own businesses. Or maybe we work with a sponsor or a philanthropy to do something similar, and instead of an investment, it’s a grant. I have thought about the best way to do this for over a year, and usually at the end I find that I have basically just reinvented Substack. So I still have some more thinking to do.

(A little back-of-the-envelope math: Platformer has around 155,000 total subscribers; if 95% of those are free, as Newton mentions above, then about 7,750 people are paying, $10 a month or $100 a year. That’s around $775,000 in subscription revenue before Substack’s 10% commission and Stripe’s credit card fees.)

It’s not every day a local news opening gets international attention. But, like pretty much everything else Taylor Swift touches, a job listing from The Tennessean and parent company Gannett for a “Taylor Swift Reporter” made sparks fly on Tuesday.

A new era in your career is coming …Ready For It? 💫 @USATODAY and @Tennessean are enchanted to announce we seek an experienced, video-forward reporter to cover @taylorswift13. Sound like the job of your wildest dreams? You could be the 1. Apply here:  https://t.co/pAu4Dhf5GK pic.twitter.com/0S7d3wpvkV

— USA TODAY NETWORK PR (@USATODAY_PR) September 12, 2023

The Guardian called the gig “a Taylor Swift fan’s wildest dream.” The New York Times, NPR, The Evening Standard, The Hill, Daily Beast, TheWrap, Variety, and CNBC ran stories. (And with this post? It’s me, hi, I’m the problem.)

Here’s the listing:

Taylor Swift Reporter

USA TODAY and The Tennessean/tennessean.com, part of the USA TODAY NETWORK, seeking an experienced, video-forward journalist to capture the music and cultural impact of Taylor Swift.

Swift’s fanbase has grown to unprecedented heights, and so has the significance of her music and growing legacy. We are looking for an energetic writer, photographer and social media pro who can quench an undeniable thirst for all things Taylor Swift with a steady stream of content across multiple platforms. Seeing both the facts and the fury, the Taylor Swift reporter will identify why the pop star’s influence only expands, what her fanbase stands for in pop culture, and the effect she has across the music and business worlds.

The successful candidate is a driven, creative and energetic journalist able to capture the excitement around Swift’s ongoing tour and upcoming album release, while also providing thoughtful analysis of her music and career.

We are looking for a journalist with a voice — but not a bias — able to quickly cultivate a national audience through smart content designed to meet readers on their terms. This reporter will chronicle the biggest moments on the next portions of Taylor Swift’s tour, offering readers of USA TODAY, The Tennessean and more than 200 local news sources an inside view.

Swift moved with her family to Tennessee as a teenager. It sounds like Gannett sees this role as more than a local gig, however. The listing stipulates that “this journalist must be willing (and legally allowed) to travel internationally.” Applicants should have a “willingness to travel extensively” and the “ability to report in more than one language [is] preferred.”

Local news reporters know low pay all too well. Gannett lists an hourly rate “between $21.63 and $50.87.”  At 40 hours/week that’d land somewhere between $45,000 to $105,000 a year.

Responses have ranged from “sign me up” to “journalism is doomed” to “RIP this person’s mentions.” Another strand could be summed up as something like “hm, this is rich coming from Gannett.” America’s largest newspaper chain is something of an anti-hero in the local news industry, doing more than any other company in the U.S. to shrink local news with round after round of layoffs.

“As Taylor Swift’s fan base has grown to unprecedented heights, so has the influence of her music and growing legacy — not only on the industry but on our culture,” Gannett’s chief content officer, Kristin Roberts, said in a statement shared with the Times. “She is shaping a generation and is relevant, influential and innovative — just like us.”

A spokesperson told me Gannett has hired 225 journalists since Roberts joined in March 2023. The company is “actively” recruiting for more than 100 open roles. On Wednesday, Gannett added another open listing: for a “Beyoncé Knowles-Carter Reporter” also with The Tennessean. (Gannett declined to comment on why these positions are based out of The Tennessean and whether they plan to list additional roles dedicated to individual artists.)

Get in Formation! @USATODAY and @Tennessean are seeking a @Beyonce Reporter to specialize in all things Queen Bey. 👑🐝 Are you ready to #Beyonslay? Apply here: https://t.co/q1gR4XlUwP #TeamGannett pic.twitter.com/jyFAIsoGEE

— USA TODAY NETWORK PR (@USATODAY_PR) September 13, 2023

Still, it’s been death by a thousand cuts for many local newsrooms and Gannett laid off 6% of its news staff in December. Even with this new hire you could say Gannett is leaving a…blank space where local news used to be.

I know everyone is dunking on this, but I’m going to add on.

Last year @Gannett laid off at least 600 ppl and stopped filling 400 jobs. People had to wait almost 2 months for their severance, which btw was capped at 26 years.

Local this, local that. Where are the priorities? https://t.co/hHDZdFSu6P

— Kati Kokal (@katikokal) September 13, 2023

legitimately smart. they should take this further – give this reporter a subscriber-only newsletter. https://t.co/gIQyzXgnpr

— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) September 12, 2023

Nashville is getting a Taylor Swift reporter

Memphis is still without an investigative reporter https://t.co/lmamf8Vrjq

— Laura D. Testino 〽️ (@ldtestino) September 12, 2023

gannett is hiring a taylor swift reporter without a “bias” so basically they’re just asking swifties to lie on their applications pic.twitter.com/jdY66wc9lT

— grace s. deng is @gracesdeng.bsky.social (@gracesdeng) September 12, 2023

My mentions are already tough enough to handle covering politics. I don’t think I’d have the strength to deal with an inbox full of Swifties. 😂 https://t.co/JKVbYwmwOO

— Catherine Griwkowsky (@CGriwkowsky) September 12, 2023

Posting because maybe a friend wants this job, but also: This is kind of incredible – not only because it’s an actual music writing job in 2023, but also. Has anyone ever heard of a single-artist reporter job before? https://t.co/VnGjQfXSKF

— Carl Wilson (@carlzoilus) September 12, 2023

Is Gannett secretly run by PopCrave… what is going on… also wasn’t the time to recruit these reporters before this summer of mega-tours started… https://t.co/AhOEdueSLb

— Blake Montgomery (@blakersdozen) September 13, 2023

If you’re ready for “The Tennessean (Taylor’s Version),” you can read the job listing here.