Paywalls rise as Americans increasingly get news from social media
Most Americans still skip paid news, even as paywalls rise and younger adults turn to social video platforms for their headlines.
Pew Research Center found in June 2025 that 83% of Americans had not paid for online news in the past year. A separate Pew result found only 1% of people pay after hitting a paywall and 32% give up on the story. That reluctance sits beside a 2024 University of Oxford study, cited by Pew, that put the median cost of U.S. digital news at $16 a month.
Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report surveyed more than 97,000 online news consumers across 48 media markets and found an accelerating shift toward news consumption through social media and video platforms, with more than half of U.S. adults under 35 now naming social media and video networks as their main source of news.
A July 2020 European Parliament study found journalism and journalists face violence, harassment, misuse of defamation and other laws, and restrictive freedom-of-information measures tied to the Covid-19 crisis. It said states must ensure a safe and favourable environment for journalists to perform their watchdog role. A broader Council of Europe press-freedom assessment found an increasingly hostile environment for journalism.
Newsrooms face legal bills, security measures, and the expense of digging into public records, court filings and local abuses of power, yet many audiences now expect that coverage to remain free. Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report found newspaper paywalls are slowly increasing, but online news is still mostly free.
Independent and nonprofit outlets such as ProPublica keep reporting free, while many local and national publishers rely on subscriptions and metered access. Some local newsrooms have questioned whether paywalls make sense for community-interest coverage, especially during major public-health events when outlets dropped paywalls for coronavirus reporting.
This article was produced by Prism’s automated news system from verified source data, official records, and press releases, then run through automated quality and moderation checks before publishing. The system is built and supervised by the people who set the standards it runs under. Read our full AI policy.
Did this article answer your question?
