 You're watching live coverage of the 2020 Night Media Forum conference where leaders in journalism, technology, philanthropy and community activism meet in Miami to explore ways to strengthen local news coverage and our nation's democracy. In the age of digital media, it's almost impossible not to read about the news while scrolling on our phones or browsing the internet. So how should we pay for the news that we take in? With me now is Priscilla Standridge, who will discuss Gallup research on what motivates consumers to pay for local news coverage. So I guess, do people realize that there is a funding crisis in journalism today? Yes, that is definitely a good question and that was really an interesting finding that we've seen multiple times in research studies that people don't realize. They actually think that their local news is doing quite well. It still shows up every day and so they don't know that it's not doing well. Around 60% of people think that local news is doing just fine. So that was really the first step that we wanted to uncover and understand. We give people information about the local news crisis and see if that changes their opinions and makes them concerned in any other way. Okay, so you lay this out and then what happens? Do they feel like this is something that is a point of pride to them or what are their kind of reactions to news or journalism and how it interacts with their lives? So overwhelmingly, Americans do think that local news is important, vital, that everyone should have access to it even though they can't pay for it. But things start to crumble a little bit when they're asked about whether or not local news should be saved if it's failing financially. People are much more mixed about that. And that's where we start to see the picture sort of fall apart. People don't really think that local news merits public or federal or even local funding from taxes, which we found really surprising. And we compared it to other types of institutions. People were much more willing to say that things like libraries or the police merited public funding. But local news just didn't fall in that same category mentally for them. And I don't think that that means that they're opposed to it. It's just not something that they see in that same bucket. But we did see along party lines that specifically Republicans were really pretty much opposed to the idea of any type of local funding for local news, Democrats were much more in favor of that. So does that go back into a kind of just general mistrust or perception that this is government media or government funding? I mean, why does it break down that way in parties? That's a great question. And we definitely see that overall local news is more trusted than national news. But when we start to break that down by party, we see that Democrats trust both local and national news, but Republicans are starting to trust local news not to the same extent that they mistrust national news, but it's really starting to catch up. We're really starting to see a lot of those same motivations, fear of bias, fear of misleading the public and pushing a different agenda than what they believe in. We did find that people felt that local news had become more liberal in many cases, according to certain parties. So that is definitely one of the motivations. Is there a generational shift here? I mean, the way that people perceive this either problem or possible solution, does it differ depending on their age? It's interesting. We weren't able to find any clear cut solution of how people wanted to pay for local news, but we did see that younger people were more willing to donate. Older people were more likely to be subscribers. Younger people seemed more willing to be part of a donation scheme, but I think that overwhelmingly what's really undercutting a lot of this is that a lot of information is free. If we think about younger generations, so much information is available for free. So we really have. And so I think that it's going to require a huge mental shift potentially around education about what it requires to collect high quality news and what it's worth to people. Do you think that this is kind of a, I don't know if it's a question that you can get in a survey, but is there any kind of optimism or hope in the sense that these people are capable of becoming conscious of the fact that there is a problem, that there are different types of solutions? Or do they just automatically say, well, it's always been free and it should stay that way? Right. So we did an experiment on this in a survey. It was really, really interesting. We didn't really know how it was going to go, which is how most social surveys go. But we gave people information. There was one group that did not receive any additional information, but one group did receive information and we told them specifically about how local news has been falling away and how this actually impacts democracy, how if there's less local news, there's fewer candidates running for local government. And so we gave people this information and we were really surprised, honestly, that it did show an increase in people being more concerned about the state of local news in their communities, more appreciative of their local news, even though we were just talking about local news in general, and they were more willing to donate. We had a small monetary incentive at the end of the survey and if people did receive this information, they were more willing to donate to News Match, which is an organization that the Knight Foundation supports. So we found that extremely encouraging because it really points to the fact that with good information, people are willing to step up and help local news, even putting their own finances as part of that. So that highlights really kind of a branding and a messaging problem that exists today is that people, or at least perhaps the news industry, is not very good about talking about itself. Everybody hates to fundraise, but yeah, absolutely. That is a big part of it. I think that we think about these big philanthropies or billionaires that are stepping in to help local news. People are really concerned about that too. We saw that in a different survey, people didn't like that idea either. So it really is going to be a question that I think that local news can start that conversation and put that information out there because the public will respond to it. That was what we found so encouraging. So where are their consensus around what the solution should be from? Do they support that the private sector should be running newspapers as what corporations as companies versus if it's philanthropies or versus if it's the government? The government was definitely not a top pick for any one group. People really thought that individuals should be responsible for the financial success. They really thought that through subscriptions and donations, that was really the preferred option. But I think we just saw a lot of mixed results on that, which points to the fact that people don't really have potentially enough information to make that decision. They don't know enough about it. And again, that points back to education. I think that if we explain the implications of different funding sources, people will be more receptive to actually being personally responsible. So is there in the group that you did not give the information to, was there any sense of pride in their local news? Or was it impacted by that piece of information? So people do generally have pride in local news. They do see it as an integral part of their community. And we did see around 44% of people willing to donate at the end of the survey. But that jumped to 55% if they received that additional information, which is if you monetize that on a larger scale, that's a large jump, especially considering that only about one in three people have ever subscribed to news, local news and their lifetime and only one in five do it right now. We also asked about types of news that people had unsubscribed from in the last five years, and we found that newspapers and magazines were the highest category in that group. So if we think about the base of the potential pool of people that are paying for news right now, anything that can move the needle on that is going to make a big difference. All right, Priscilla, Standards Room Gallup, thanks so much. Thank you so much for having me.