Subscriptions still on the rise at most newspapers in the Medill Subscriber Engagement Index

One ray of good news during the Covid pandemic: More U.S. consumers read and subscribed to local news publications.

But industry experts feared that rising tide might ebb in 2022 as people headed back to work and inflation began to crimp household budgets. Indeed, there have been signs that readership was falling off. In September, the Poynter Institute for Media Studies reported that pageviews and unique visitors have fallen about 20 percent at local newspaper sites in 2022, a scary metric at a time when costs are rising and traditional advertising revenue continues to fall.

But data from the Medill Subscriber Engagement Index shows that even as the pandemic eased, subscriptions have continued to rise at all three categories of newspapers tracked: large, medium and small.

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