Research institute · Pew Research Center
Local news in America: 88% won't pay, online beats print
Pew Research Center's April 2026 update to the Local News Fact Sheet shows the US local-news audience has finished its digital migration: 68% of newspaper readers now consume the title online, online-only sources have tripled since 2018 to 42% reach, and 21% of Americans still follow local news closely, half the share of a decade ago.
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Key findings at a glance
- 21% of US adults say they follow local news very closely in 2025, down from 37% in 2016. Closely-engaged local-news audiences have nearly halved in nine years.
- 42% of US adults get local news at least sometimes from online-only sources, up from 15% in 2018. That is the single largest gain on the platform map.
- 68% of those who still get news from a local daily newspaper now primarily read it online. In 2018 that share was 43%.
- 52% of US adults get local news from online forums, Facebook groups or Nextdoor, up 14 points from 38% in 2018.
- 36% of US adults get local news from news influencers, a category Pew measured for the first time in 2025. Among 18-29s the share jumps to 51%.
- 88% of US adults have NOT paid, subscribed or donated to any local news source in the past year. Just 12% have.
- 50% of non-payers say the main reason they do not pay is that they can find plenty of local news for free.
- 39% of US adults now think their local news outlets are NOT doing well financially. That share was 24% in 2018.
- 34% of US adults say local news outlets are extremely or very important to their community, down from 44% a year earlier. Perceived importance is sliding too.
- 28% now prefer a news website or app for local news, up from 23% in 2018. Television preference fell from 41% to 34% over the same period.
What the report covers
The fact sheet is the latest sweep of Pew's longest-running local-news tracker, run under the Pew-Knight Initiative with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. It pulls together two American Trends Panel waves from August and December 2025 covering attention, sources, platforms, payment behaviour, perceived financial health and perceived importance.
The headline shift Pew is documenting is not collapse, it is reallocation. Americans still consume local news; they just no longer pay for it, no longer follow it closely, and have moved decisively onto digital surfaces. Local TV still has the broadest reach (65%) but its preferred-channel share has dropped seven points in seven years. Local daily newspapers lost the same seven points on reach and a much larger share of their remaining audience reads them online. Forums, Nextdoor, online-only outlets and news influencers are absorbing the difference.
For a UK reader this matters because the trend lines are directionally identical on this side of the Atlantic. The platforms Pew tracks, Facebook groups, online-only publishers, news influencers, are the same surfaces UK local audiences have been migrating to since 2018, and the same surfaces UK paid-media and content budgets need to account for.
What this means for UK marketers
Three practical reads for UK digital marketers and local-business operators.
The local-news audience is on social, not on the broadcaster's site. When 52% of US adults get local news from Facebook groups or Nextdoor and another 36% from news influencers, the implication for buying reach against local-intent audiences is direct: a meaningful chunk of that inventory now sits behind Meta's ad platforms, not behind the local newspaper's display network. For UK SMBs running geo-targeted campaigns this argues for a heavier weighting toward Facebook and Instagram placements and community-group targeting versus the legacy local-press digital buy. The IAB UK's ongoing ad-spend research has been pointing at the same redistribution inside total UK display.
If 88% of the audience refuses to pay, the editorial paywall is not the marketing partner it used to be. The shrinking-paywall audience matters for two practical reasons. First, branded-content and native-advertising packages on local outlets reach a thinning slice of the local-news consumer. Second, audiences who do not pay for news are not the audiences that respond well to upmarket professional-services advertising, buying intent skews to free-content surfaces. UK local-business marketers still placing line-item budgets with regional publisher groups should be measuring downstream conversion attribution carefully rather than relying on impressions delivered.
News influencers are the new local-news channel, and brands underspend on them. A third of US adults, and over half of 18-29s, get local news from news influencers, a category that did not exist on Pew's questionnaire two years ago. UK creator partnerships in the local-business space remain dominated by lifestyle and review verticals; the equivalent civic, community and hyper-local creator tier is underdeveloped and undermonetised. We have covered the trust caveats in detail, short version, the audience is selectively sceptical, not blindly credulous, but the reach is real and is structurally growing.
The contrarian lane: 32% of Americans aged 65+ still follow local news very closely and 60% of them prefer television as the channel. Paid-search and display budgets targeting older UK demographics for high-value services (financial planning, will-writing, mobility products, downsizing estate agents) should still be reading the local press digital edition as a meaningful surface, it is the younger end of the audience that has left, not the older end.
How they got the data
The April 2026 fact sheet is compiled from two waves of Pew's American Trends Panel: an August 2025 wave (questions on perceived financial health and payment behaviour) and a December 2025 wave (questions on attention, source mix, platform preference and perceived importance). The ATP recruits via address-based sampling using the US Postal Service's Computerized Delivery Sequence File and conducts interviews online and via live telephone in English and Spanish. Oversamples are weighted back to population proportions.
Year-on-year comparisons against 2018 use the equivalent question from Pew's 2018 local-news survey. The "news influencers" item was asked for the first time in 2025 so it has no historic comparison.
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Read the full report
From Pew Research Center · published 14/04/2026