The news consumption of digital natives

Abstract

Digitalization has shaped the newspaper market and nowadays the news consumption of people increasingly takes place in the online environment. At the same time when print newspapers can no longer be considered as the revenue drivers for media companies, especially digital natives remain reluctant to pay for news content in the digital media. As a result, the digitalization brought by the Internet is challenging the operations of media companies and they need to find new ways to attract consumers to using their services.

Digital natives represent a generation that has grown up surrounded by the digital technologies and got used to utilizing the Internet for information collection. So far, the research regarding the news consumption of the digital natives has been limited to the generation’s news consumption habits in traditional media. The purpose of this research is to investigate the news consumption behavior of the digital native generation in the digital environment. This research aims at revealing the factors that drive the news consumption habits of the digital natives. The study represents the qualitative approach to research. In order to answer the research problem, qualitative semi-structured interviews were used to collect the data. The respondents of the study consist of university students as they represent digital natives.

The results indicate that digital natives want to have control over the news they consume and what they pay for. The digital natives expect to be provided with alternatives and do not want a ready-made package – they want to customize. This study supports the findings of previous research by showing that digital natives place a high priority on fast speed and easiness of use when consuming news and expect all components in their news consumption process to fulfill such characteristics. According to this research both mobile and social media nowadays play an important role in digital natives’ news consumption and such characteristics positively contribute to their willingness to pay for online news. News content can be seen to highly impact digital natives’ willingness to pay as the digital natives are more interested in subscribing to news which is related to their lives. To conclude, taking into account these factors newspapers can better serve the segment of digital natives.