How People Integrate News into Their Everyday Routines: A Context-Centered Approach to News Habits

Abstract

This article uses the notion of habit to explore how news users adopt a new subscription into their everyday routines, and identifies facilitators and obstacles helping or inhibiting this process. Sixty-eight participants received a three-week newspaper trial subscription and were interviewed about their experiences afterward. Facilitators of repeated use were concurrent rewards; embedment into existing routines; and visual reminders. Obstacles were lack of steady routines; strong existing habits; perceived effort; disillusionment; and accessibility. Findings point to the importance of visibility: participants – even those with positive initial experiences – tended to forget their subscription. Visual cues were needed to remind participants to read their subscription: app icons, open browser tabs, social media posts, push notifications, and the print newspaper. Proactive implementation of these cues suggests participants themselves were also aware of their propensity to forget the subscription. Existing (news) habits either helped anchor use of the subscription or blocked it by being automatically cued up by context features. Results also point to a mental hurdle: having to muster up the cognitive and motivational energy to start reading the news. Finally, findings suggest that concurrently experienced rewards may be more conducive to news habit formation than retrospectively experienced rewards.

Keywords:

• Habits
• news use
• news habits
• qualitative research
• interviews
• routines

Introduction

While perhaps the greatest challenge for news media remains to convince users to pay for (digital) news (Fletcher and Nielsen 2017; Groot Kormelink 2022; O’Brien, Wellbrock, and Kleer 2020), an underappreciated challenge is how to get users to commit to using a news medium. Research shows that the first weeks after subscribing to news are crucial: reading habits are “established very early” and almost half of (young) digital trial subscribers don’t use their subscription anymore after a few weeks (Wadbring and Bergström 2021, 331). Those that develop habits are also more likely to transition into paid subscriptions (Wadbring and Bergström 2021). This suggests news media should focus on finding their way into new subscribers’ daily routines as soon as possible.

While it may seem that people who actively sign up for a news subscription should be sufficiently motivated to act on their intended behavior of consuming this news, research on how habits work suggests it isn’t quite so simple: people’s motivations and intentions play a limited role in the overall habit formation process (Ouellette and Wood 1998). Although intentions do help initiate a potential habit, (formed) habits are described as automated (i.e., non-deliberate) behavioral responses that through repetition become associated with a certain context or environment, after which this behavior is triggered by the perception of characteristics of that environment (Verplanken 2018; Wood 2019). Habits conceptualized as behavior triggered by such context cues may help explain why forming a new news habit is so challenging: not only does an association between this new behavior and a context need to be formed over time (i.e., the behavior needs to be repeated in a stable context) (Wood and Neal 2007), this desired habit also competes with existing (media) habits that are triggered by context cues in this same environment. For instance, someone who intends to replace their social media use in the morning with reading news on their phone, must not only get the latter practice into their system but also unlearn “the memory trace” (Wood and Neal 2009, 588) of their social media habit that is automatically activated upon seeing their phone. Acquiring the desired habit requires both overwriting the old and developing the new response (Wood and Neal 2009).

Whereas researchers have studied what makes people subscribe to news (e.g., Kim, Collier, and Stroud 2021), how news habits form or change naturally over time (e.g., Broersma and Swart 2022; Diddi and LaRose 2006; Edgerly et al. 2018; Ghersetti and Westlund 2018; Peters and Schrøder 2018; Westlund and Weibull 2013), and which interventions stimulate media habit formation (Schnauber-Stockmann and Naab 2019; Stawarz, Cox, and Blandford 2015), what is less clear is what happens during the first few weeks after people subscribe to news. This article therefore explores how new subscribers (try to) adopt a (digital) subscription into their everyday routines, qualitatively describing this process and identifying facilitators and obstacles. Distinguishing between practice, habit, and routine, this article refers to practice as the actual act of “doing” (Couldry 2004) something with news, e.g., reading a news app. Over time, this practice may or may not become a habit, which refers to the automatic performance of this practice as response to a context cue. While habit and routine are often used interchangeably, in this article routine refers to a set of practices (or habits, if performed in response to cues), performed in more or less the same order, e.g., a morning routine.

Participants were provided with a three-week trial subscription and interviewed in-depth afterward. While a three-week period is too brief to establish whether habits actually formed and will miss long-term factors impacting news habit formation such as generation, age, lifecycle, family characteristics and sociocultural environment (Peters and Schrøder 2018; Shehata 2016; Westlund and Weibull 2013), this article shines light on how people experience and negotiate the “abrupt acquisition” (Vulpius et al. 2022, 13) of a new news medium in an everyday context. Inspired by “domestication theory” (Silverstone 1994), the paper takes what will be described as a “context-centered” approach that departs from the notion of active news selection (e.g., uses and gratifications theory, see Katz, Haas, and Gurevitch 1973), providing insight into how and why initial news use either peter outs or crystallizes into people’s everyday routines. Findings may help news media influence the habit formation process, which becomes increasingly important as news media more and more depend on subscriptions for financial viability.

What Are Habits?

Although this article will not be able to establish whether news habits actually formed, I argue that the concept of habit is a useful lens through which to study how news users adopt a news subscription into their everyday routines. The idea of habit has been present in media research since at least Berelson’s (1949) classic work on what “missing the newspaper” means, but it has, as LaRose (2010, 194) argues, “been periodically discovered, forgotten, and rediscovered in communication research.” As it relates to news, the notion of habits has been approached in broadly three ways. First, there is the everyday meaning of media habits: regular, more or less stable patterns of news consumption (or lack thereof) (e.g., Edgerly et al. 2018; Palmer and Toff 2020; Shehata 2016; Westlund and Weibull 2013). Second, within uses and gratifications theory (UGT), habits emphasize the ritualistic character of news use. LaRose (2010, 207) cites Rubin (1984, 69), who distinguished between two orientations to news use: instrumental (e.g., information, entertainment) and ritualistic, defined as “the more or less habitualized use of a medium to gratify diversionary needs or motives” (emphasis added). However, as LaRose (2010, 207) argues, by classifying habit as a gratification, habitual responses are seen as “active and conscious processes rather than automatic and nonconscious ones.” This conception is at odds with an understanding of habits informed by recent developments in neurology, animal studies and social psychology (LaRose 2010; Wood 2019). In this third approach, definitions of habits center around “automaticity in media consumption formed through repeated behavior in stable circumstances” (LaRose 2017, 1; see also Diddi and LaRose 2006; LaRose 2010; Peters and Schrøder 2018). To understand how this conception differs from earlier understandings of habits and what the implications are for this article, this definition of habits will first be explicated.

Habits can be defined as “memory-based propensities to respond automatically to specific cues, which are acquired by the repetition of cue-specific behavior in stable contexts” (Verplanken 2018:4; see also Verplanken and Wood 2006; Wood and Neal 2007, 2009). In a slightly different definition, Wood (2019, 43) defines habits as “a mental association between a context cue and a response that develops as we repeat an action in that context for a reward.” The slight difference between these definitions becomes clear as their various dimensions are unpacked.

Mental Association, Repetition, Rewards

First, the notion of habits as cognitive associations between context and behavior may be compared – following Léon Dumont (in James 1887, in Verplanken 2018, 2) – to water leaving imprints and creating pathways in sand allowing the water to run more smoothly. This mental association requires time (and repetition) to build but also to lose: these “slow-to-change memory traces […] ensure this learning is retained for future use” (Wood and Neal 2009, 582). The shortcut is energy-efficient, freeing up mental resources for other cognitive processes (Verplanken 2018; Wood 2019).

For a mental association between behavior and context to form, behavior must be repeated over time. The time it takes to form a habit ranges from 18 to 254 days (Lally et al. 2010). Lally et al. (2010) show that the relationship between repetition and automatic behavior has an asymptomatic curve: initial repetitions lead to larger increases in automaticity than later repetitions, until a plateau is reached (see also Schnauber-Stockmann and Naab 2019). An important precondition for (initially) repeating our behavior is that we experience it as rewarding. To build a mental association between behavior and context, rewards must be experienced during or immediately after performing said behavior; instant gratifications are therefore more effective for habit building than delayed rewards (Wood 2019, 118). Finally, rewards are especially effective if they are uncertain, e.g., when people receive rewards at random intervals, as with casino slot machines (Wood 2019; Wood and Neal 2009). This helps explain why social media are so successful at establishing habits: checking your Twitter feed has a variable outcome, varying from seeing nothing new to coming across an interesting post or even getting positive social feedback (likes, retweets) (Anderson and Wood 2021; Bayer and LaRose 2018).

Animal studies show that as habits mature, the reward becomes less salient and the habitual behavior can be triggered by cues independently (Dickinson 1985; Wood 2019). As Wood (2019, 126) puts it, “insensitivity to reward is the gold standard for identifying a habit.” This explains why rewards are not part of Verplanken’s (2018) earlier-mentioned definition of established habits.

Intention and Automaticity

If intention plays a less significant role in habitual behavior than commonly assumed, it is typically required to initiate a desired habit. Indeed, LaRose (2010) presents a model of media habits that distinguishes between the habit acquisition phase, in which the association between a behavior and its desired outcome is formed in a stable context, and the habit activation phase, where the habitual behavior is automatically triggered by the context cues. Importantly, this does not mean intention no longer plays a role, but rather that as the habit grows stronger, the influence of intention decreases (Triandis 1977). Automaticity is characterized by four dimensions which have been shown to occur independently: lack of intentionality, lack of controllability, lack of attention, and lack of awareness (LaRose 2010; Saling and Phillips 2007).

As suggested by the phrasing “memory-based propensities to respond automatically to specific cues” (Verplanken 2018, 1, emphasis added), habitual behavior is not inevitable. However, acting counter-habitually takes “cognitive and motivational effort” because it requires us to “override the accessible habitual response in memory” (Wood and Neal 2009, 583). Factors inhibiting conscious actions and therefore making us more likely to respond habitually include time pressure, distraction and limited self-control (Wood and Neal 2009, 580).

One technique for overriding our habitual response is introducing friction (Wood 2019). In a set of experiments, Neal et al. (2011) asked students to watch a movie in a campus theater and gave them either fresh or stale popcorn. Those with a strong habit of eating popcorn in this context ate most of it, regardless of whether they rated it as tasty or not. Those who did not have this habit only ate the fresh popcorn. This shows the automaticity of habits: despite the valence of their experience, students with a strong habit ate the popcorn. However, when a follow-up experiment asked students to eat the popcorn with their non-dominant hand, they all only ate the fresh popcorn (Neal et al. 2011). The introduced friction interrupted the automaticity of their behavior and made them act more intentionally.

What this example also suggests – and what has been emphasized less in the habits literature – is the embodied dimension of habit: the bodily dexterity (skills) required to acquire and perform habitual behavior (Hegel 1830). The more complex behavior is to perform, the longer it takes to establish a habit (Verplanken 2006). Regarding news habit formation, this means attention may also be paid to material and sensory dimensions involved in learning to master a device, platform or medium (Groot Kormelink and Costera Meijer 2019).

Context Cues, Drivers, and Obstacles

For a habit to form, a more or less stable context is required (Verplanken 2018; Wood and Neal 2007). Wood and Neal (2007, 2009) even describe a relatively “rigid” relation between behavior and performance context. For instance, newspaper habits of students transferring to different universities only survived if the performance context (e.g., reading the paper with others) remained unchanged (Wood, Tam, and Witt 2005).

As through repetition the association between the forming habit and the performance context grows stronger, characteristics of that context – context cues – come to automatically trigger the behavioral response, saving one from having to spend cognitive effort on routine behavior (LaRose 2017; Wood and Neal 2007). Context cues can be either external (e.g., seeing the coffee machine) or internal (e.g., feeling bored) (LaRose 2017). Once formed, these associations between behavior and context are so strong that they can survive an interruption (weekends, holidays); as soon as the context cue is encountered again, the behavioral response is activated (Lally, Wardle, and Gardner 2011).

While many habits are situation-specific (e.g., popcorn in theater, seatbelt in car), media habits tend to be less rigidly tied to specific locations. LaRose (2010) argues that media have become so ubiquitous that a broad range of cues may trigger media habits. For instance, the sight of our smartphone – “a portable context” (LaRose 2017, 7) – may trigger a social media check throughout the day. Schnauber-Stockmann and Naab (2019) suggest that mobile app habits may be triggered by “gateway behavior” (using the smartphone) and the sight of an app icon. Anderson and Wood (2021) identify four types of cues that can activate social media habits: mood cues (e.g., stress), design feature cues (e.g., notifications), technology cues (e.g., smartphone use), and location and activity cues (e.g., riding the bus). Stawarz, Cox, and Blandford (2015) found that event-based cues are more successful at increasing automaticity than time-based cues.

Finally, the habit formation process is impacted by drivers and obstacles (Wood 2019). For the purposes of this article, which focuses on individual adoption of a news subscription – and therefore does not take into account such long-term processes as socialization (e.g., Edgerly et al. 2018; Palmer and Toff 2020; Shehata 2016) – a distinction can be made between what will be called facilitators and obstacles deriving from news media and news users themselves. News media seek to steer users’ behavior via such strategies as social media promotion (Bayer and LaRose 2018), push notifications (Wheatley and Ferrer-Conill 2021) and newsletters (Hendrickx, Donders, and Picone 2020). News users themselves can inhibit undesirable habits by introducing friction, e.g., via various digital detox strategies (Syvertsen, 2020), or stimulate formation of desirable habits through imposing deliberate strategies such as taking preparatory action and programming effective cues (Lally, Wardle, and Gardner 2011). “Stacking” refers to adding a desired behavior (on)to an existing habit (e.g., flossing after brushing teeth), and “swapping” refers to trading in an existing habit for the new desired behavior in the same context (e.g., switching to decaf coffee) (Wood 2019).

Studying News Habit Formation: A Context-Centered Approach

As suggested earlier, the notion of news habits is partially at odds with the idea of active news selection (LaRose 2010). The latter is associated most notably with uses and gratifications theory (UGT), which seeks to understand how users select certain media to fulfil certain needs (Katz, Haas, and Gurevitch 1973). As LaRose (2010) argues, conceiving of habitual responses as “active and conscious processes” disregards the “automatic and nonconscious” character of habits (LaRose 2010, 207). While intentions and volition play a role in initiating a new news practice, they move to the background as the practice transitions from being more or less intentionally performed to being activated by context cues. This creates a challenge: if news use becomes less about active selection and intention and more about automatic and non-deliberate processes, how can we study news habit formation from a user perspective?

I suggest that studying how a new news practice becomes (or fails to become) habitualized requires – somewhat paradoxically – decentering news users and their intentions and centering instead the environment or context in which the news practice is situated: a context-centered approach. While reminiscent of domestication theory, which focuses – among others things – on how media technologies are appropriated, objectified and incorporated as (material) objects and (meaningful) texts “to control them, and to render them more or less ‘invisible’ within the daily routines of daily life” (Silverstone 1994), a context-centered approach starts more explicitly from the environment (cf. Courtois, Verdegem, and De Marez 2013). After all, news habit formation is about how features of an environment (context cues) come to “take over” and activate automatic responses. Second, a new news practice does not take place in a vacuum, but interacts or competes with established (media) habits. Therefore, studying news habit formation requires starting from the environment and disentangling the role context cues, existing habits, obstacles, rewards and implementation techniques play. As the latter suggests, taking a context-centered approach does not mean news users’ agency, nor news as a material object and meaningful text, are ignored; rather, it brings the environment and its taken-for-granted features explicitly to the fore. It should be emphasized once more that this article does not determine whether habit formation took place, but rather uses the concept of habit as a lens through which to make sense of the (initial) integration of news into everyday routines.

Method

Studying news adoption from a user perspective requires a methodological design that approximates a natural setting. 68 participants that indicated interest in receiving a free newspaper trial tried out a subscription for three weeks and were subsequently interviewed about their experiences. To guarantee a “natural” process, the three-week period was not uninterrupted: participants were not asked to keep track of their news use and received no instruction other than the welcome email from the newspaper they subscribed to. A three-week period was chosen as a compromise between participants having sufficient experience with integrating the subscription into their everyday routines while also ensuring they were able to remember and share their experiences in some detail (cf. Groot Kormelink 2020).

After three weeks, participants were interviewed in-depth by the author and BA- and MA-students Journalism from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Students were provided with a topic list for the interview and received extensive interview training. Participants were selected via a convenience sample from the interviewers’ own circles. As a result, while ages ranged from 20 to 75, the ranges 20–29 (N = 40) and 50–59 (N = 19) dominated. For the same reason, education levels were relatively high. The sample included slightly more women (N = 36) than men (N = 32). Since participants’ interest in receiving a trial subscription was only inferred implicitly from their response to our call for participants, it is not unlikely that their interest in news was lower than that of people who subscribe to news of their own volition. It should be emphasized that this study doesn’t aim for generalizability but rather seeks to identify facilitators and obstacles in the news adoption process.

Provided by publisher DPG Media, participants chose a trial subscription from among national newspapers De Volkskrant (N = 37), AD (N = 12), and Trouw (N = 7), and Amsterdam-centric regional newspaper Het Parool (N = 12). They could also select one of three subscription types: full access (print paper every day plus digital access) (N = 38), weekend paper in print plus digital access (N = 12), or digital only (N = 18). Digitally, participants for each title were able to use the news website and the news app, both continuously updated, and a special app for a downloadable PDF-version of the newspaper. All apps are free to download, but subscribers must register and log in for full access. On the regular news app, participants were also able to activate push notifications. From here onward, the term “subscription” will be used to refer to the newspaper in all its forms; whenever relevant, the exact type will be referenced.

In the Netherlands, as elsewhere, print readership has dwindled over the past decades, although numbers have stabilized in recent years (Lauf and Brennecke 2021). Use of newspaper websites and apps has remained stable (Lauf and Brennecke 2021). Age appears to be a main determinant for which news format people use: whereas among 18–24, only 6% names print newspapers as their main source of news, among 55+ this percentage is 12%. Vice versa, whereas digital media (without social media) form the main source for 42% of 18–24, for 55+ this number is only 19% (Lauf and Brennecke 2021, 19). While younger participants in this study were more likely to choose a digital-only subscription than the older participants, most nonetheless opted for the full access option (print and digital).

Interviews typically lasted between 30 and 60 min. The three-week trial started in February 2020 and the interviews were held in late February and March 2020, right before the Dutch government announced its first measures to curtail the COVID-19 virus. The pandemic therefore had no impact on the data collection. The interviews were semi-structured, to ensure similar topics were broached in each interview while still leaving room to deviate when necessary (Kvale 1996). Taking a “context-centered” approach meant participants were encouraged to paint a vivid picture of their news use practices, starting from the moments leading up to it. To tease out how context cues, existing habits, obstacles, rewards, automaticity, implementation techniques and other factors might play a role, participants were also asked to explain what they did during those moments of news use prior to receiving the subscription; to explain why sometimes they did read the subscription and other times didn’t; what they were(n’t) going to miss about the subscription; whether they had to remind themselves to read the subscription; and whether they consciously tried to read the subscription. Having participants vividly describe their practices step-by-step was necessary to explore how the subscription was or wasn’t embedded into their established routines. Although participants were asked to reconstruct their practices and routines rather than recall e.g., frequencies of news consumption, it is possible they forgot or misreported relevant details. Well-documented limitations of relying on participants’ memory therefore apply. An alternative would have been a more elaborate ethnographic approach, but this would have been highly time-consuming (and arguable inefficient) for all parties involved. I therefore argue that context-centered in-depth interviews were the most suitable approach to establishing how the news subscription was integrated into the participants’ everyday routines. Since participants received no reminders during the three-week period, some did not use their digital subscription at all (cf. Wadbring and Bergström); indeed, participants’ forgetting to use their digital subscription turned out to be a key finding.

All interviews were recorded and transcribed, and participants signed informed consent forms, following the protocol of Research Ethics Review Committee of the Faculty of Humanities at VU Amsterdam. For the analysis, the general inductive approach (Thomas, 2006) was used. The author first read all the transcripts (open) coding anything that related to news adoption and habit formation. Next, similar codes were grouped together, and (sub)categories were further refined through constant comparison.

Results

From the participants’ in-depth descriptions of their three-week trial subscription experiences, several facilitators and obstacles were identified that helped or hindered adoption of the subscription into their everyday routines. Together, these give insight into the news adoption process from a user perspective. Although certain facilitators and obstacles were more dominant for certain news formats, all eight categories were found across formats. Wherever relevant, the type of format participants used will be emphasized.

Facilitators of News Adoption

Three facilitators seemed to help participants use the subscription on a regular basis: concurrent rewards, embedment into existing routines, and visual reminders.

1. Concurrent rewards: positive feedback loop

Unsurprisingly, having a positive experience with the subscription was conducive to repeated usage (LaRose 2017; Wood and Neal 2009). A first prerequisite for repeated use was a positive experience of the news content. Asked to compare his print newspaper to a meal, Kris (23) compared it to a perfectly boiled egg for breakfast:

Often you’re in the mood for it in the morning, it’s quite delicious, especially with a bit of salt. But […] before you open it you hope that the inside […] comes out well, that it’s not too soft or too hard. And you also hope that for a newspaper, that when you open it, the news is a bit juicy and interesting.

It appears to be the variable reward (cf. Wood and Neal 2009) in particular that makes Kay return to the paper: potentially being surprised by a tasty reward.

A second, well-documented reward of using news is social utility: it allows people to converse with others (Katz, Haas, and Gurevitch 1973). However, this reward was mentioned both by participants that used the subscription regularly and those that used it just a few times. Social utility may therefore be a less reliable facilitator of repeated news use, explained by research showing that immediate rewards are more effective than delayed rewards (Wood 2019). Indeed, the two rewards mentioned specifically by participants who read the subscription regularly were concurrently experienced.

Moment of Quiet

The first concurrently experienced reward was feeling a sense of quiet, having a moment for oneself, especially in the morning or after coming home from work. Giorgia (26) and Max (22) illustrate:

It really is relaxation, I think. At breakfast I really just sit down and read it quietly. Then I’m stretching my breakfast time, if you will. Otherwise I just eat my yoghurt and move on. […] Now I’m just sitting there, reading the paper. That’s what it is, it’s a sort of peace.

The reward here is less in the news itself than in the experience of the moment. Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink (2015) have suggested before that the practice of “reading” (in-depth) may be as much – or perhaps more – about the relaxing ritual as about engaging with content.

More Useful

The second concurrently experienced reward had a sense of accomplishment to it: participants felt their news activity was more “useful” than the activities (social media, Netflix) it had replaced.

Instead of aimlessly being on my phone on Instagram, I enjoy it more to read a few articles. It gives me peace. […] Instead of aimlessly scrolling on social media, I read articles. I experience that as positive, so it did surprise me positively. (Valerie, 24)

If I look back at what I did before, these activities like playing games or watching series didn’t bring me much extra in the morning, so it was actually a waste of your time to wake up and just keep yourself busy but I didn’t really get something out of it, and with the paper it’s the opposite, because yes, you wake up with it quietly, but also gain some new knowledge, you know what’s going on. (Jason, 28)

Note that here a moment of quiet is also referenced, but the emphasis is on the perceived productivity of the activity: unlike using social media, which feels wasteful and aimless, reading news gets you something.

• 2. Embedment into existing habits

A second facilitator helping participants read the subscription regularly was embedment into their existing habits – also known as “stacking” (Wood 2019). Geoffrey (54) simply added his print newspaper to his existing breakfast routine which already included a newspaper:

[I read] everything, no exception, because I have breakfast every day and then I also read the newspaper every day. […] It fit seamlessly into the habit I already had. […] That was little effort, because I already read [the other paper], […] I could easily add it.

The phrasing “because I have breakfast everyday” is key: his existing newspaper habit is already automatically cued up by his breakfast, making it easier to add one more component to his morning routine.

Other participants engaged in the similar practice of “swapping” (Wood 2019): replacing a former habit (e.g., checking social media) with reading the subscription as part of the same routine. We saw this earlier with Jason, who swapped out “useless” activities for a news app: “So the steps remain the same, only [before], you looked at Instagram […] and now you start the [news app].” Pete (58) seamlessly replaced the weekend paper he used to buy on Saturday with its digital counterpart he now received for free:

Well, the point of time didn’t really change, just on Saturday morning, groceries and then coffee and the paper. And now it’s groceries, a cup of coffee and the tablet or phone. So the situation is the same, only the physical thing you’re holding is different.

• 3. Visual cues: “ah yes!”

The third facilitator stimulating repeated use of the subscription were visual cues that reminded participants to read the news. A frequent phrase used by participants as they recounted the moments leading up to reading their subscription was “ah yes!” (in Dutch “oh ja!,” which could also be translated as “of course!”) – illustrating their tendency to forget they now had access until they were (visually) reminded of it. Indeed, all participants had access to the digital version, but many completely forgot about this. As will become clear in this section, this may be due to a lack of visual reminders. First, for the print version, the physical paper itself was a visual cue. Encountering the product reminded participants to read it:

In the beginning I wasn’t thinking about it, because [in our house] you don’t come into the hallway for no reason (laughs) so in the beginning I would suddenly see it and think “Ah yes, the paper!” (Anita, 58)

Illustrating the relevance of taking a context-centered approach, for Anita entering the hallway wasn’t part of her morning routine, and as a result, she simply didn’t think of the paper until she saw it laying there.

For the digital versions (apps and websites), four different visual cues reminded participants to read the news. First, participants saw posts from the newspaper they subscribed to on their social media feed.

It’s very bottom-up, so I see it and then something in me thinks ‘hey, interesting’, and then I look at it. It’s not regulated top down, that I’m like ‘oh, now I’m consciously going to read a bit of newspaper (Joshua, 22).

Second, push notifications reminded participants (who had them activated) to read their subscription. Lesley (25) illustrates how easily participants forgot they installed a news app:

Actually I got a lot of push notifications and that was the moment I was actually reminded of it, “Oh, I have the newspaper!.” Because it’s not in my routine to read the paper. […] Then I was reminded: “Ah yes, I have that app.”

Third, participants were reminded to read their subscription by simply seeing the icon of the news app on their phone:

It’s not like it was really a daily routine that I opened it subconsciously, but it was that I went to my apps […] and there it was and then I think “Ah yes, I could read that again” (Trey, 23).

I think I looked at the apps that were on my phone and that I saw it and then clicked on it. It did stand out with that red color. […] Then you saw the logo again and thought “Ah yes, I could do that.” (Jane, 22)

This aligns with Schnauber-Stockmann and Naab (2019) suggestion that icons can cue up app use. Visually encountering the icon made them remember to check the app.

Finally, participants more or less deliberately organized their own visual cue by leaving their news site or app open.

I have to say it helped that I left [the browser] open on the site of [newspaper], on my phone or laptop. Then you grab for it more easily, so then it does become more of a routine. […] Whenever you see that name again, you think “Ah yes, I could read that” (Lydia, 24).

I made it my home page on my laptop and that works a little better, because then, yeah, you see it every time. And an app you have to open separately and then I’m […] not so inclined to that it. So this works better (Elly, 28).

It is remarkable that participants engaged in these deliberate tactics, as a conscious decision was made in this study to not give participants any instructions, in order to approximate a real-life situation. Apparently aware of their own likeliness to forget their subscription, they deliberately organized a visual cue as a reminder.

Obstacles of News Adoption

In addition to three facilitators, five obstacles were found that hindered participants from regular subscription usage: lack of steady routines; strong existing habits; perceived effort; disillusionment; and accessibility.

• 1. Lack of steady routine

First, participants with irregular daily routines had more trouble regularly reading their subscription, consistent with the notion of habit formation requiring repetition in a stable context (Wood and Neal 2007). Olivia (53) doesn’t have set daily routines because she works parttime, which she believes hindered regular use of the paper:

You hear about people that [drink] a cup of coffee every morning at 8am with the newspaper and then they’re off to work. I don’t have that routine and didn’t get it with this trial subscription. […] That ritual [or] moment of grabbing the paper isn’t there.

Similarly, Lesley (25) currently has more free time due to her irregular work schedule, and believes this lack of steady routine is the reason she didn’t read the paper regularly: “Say soon I have a [steady] job, then I’m on the train to somewhere, then I think I’d read the paper more than I do now. […] Maybe doesn’t sound logical, but yeah.” While this may seem counterintuitive, it makes sense from a habit formation perspective: without a steady routine, there are no context cues to trigger or – as the potential habit is still forming – at least anchor the news behavior. Without such anchors, Lesley didn’t have context cues reminding her to read the paper, effectively leaving her newspaper use to run purely on intention, which is a less effective way to sustain desired behavior (Ouellette and Wood 1998). The significance of non-steady routines was also seen during weekends: less strict weekend regimes made it harder for participants to remember to read the paper: “I think I forgot it most in the weekend, because then you’re at home and doing other things and just having a very different rhythm than during the week” (Jane, 22).

• 2. Strong existing habits

While a lack of steady pre-existing routines inhibited regular subscription usage, the same was true for strong existing habits. Sylvia (30) usually eats breakfast at work but tried to create a new breakfast newspaper moment at home. Soon, she found herself converting to her old morning habits:

I thought, I’ll try to really build this [breakfast] in with the newspaper […] but I barely did that, because I pretty quickly went back to my rhythm of eating at work.

Significant about this quote is how she consciously tried to create a new news ritual, but failed to do so because her existing habits were too strong.

Strong existing news habits also proved an obstacle, especially for those reading the newspaper digitally. Erica (26) and Kris (23) installed the app of their chosen news brand, but found themselves quickly forgetting this app and automatically going back to the app they already used:

Usually I only read the NOS-app. And then I looked at [the new app] a few times and it peaked my interest, […] but actually I just forgot to go to De Volkskrant. I kept going to the NOS app.

I do have to say, I had to remind myself a few times to actually look at that app. Usually I actually always look at Nu.nl, so to suddenly open another app, that has to get into your system.

These examples illustrate how developing a new news habit requires both learning the new habit and unlearning the “memory trace” of the established habit (Wood and Neal 2009). While intending to use the new app, the context cues on their smartphone automatically triggered their existing news habit.

• 3. Required effort

A third obstacle to repeated news use was the (perceived) effort required to read the news. First, the print paper required too much physical effort to be retrieved, particularly for those not living on ground floors or having to go outside to get the paper. Agnes (35):

I have to walk to the mail box [because] we live above a store, so our mail box is downstairs [outside] at the gate and that’s a barrier. […] You know, you just got out of bed in your bath rope and you’re like, oh, I’d have to go downstairs, it’s raining, so I’d have to put my shoes on.

Second, reading the news also requires time investment. Oliver (22) illustrates:

What I pictured is just that I’d have a cup of coffee and a croissant in the morning and that I would nicely sit with the paper. But when push came to shove I just noticed that yeah it does take a lot of time to read the paper, especially reading the whole paper through.

Third, reading the news also requires a certain cognitive commitment: not only while reading the newspaper, but also prior to this: getting yourself to actually do it. Indeed, participants referred to a mental hurdle, a threshold they needed to pass to read the paper. At play here was that reading a newspaper was seen as something you either do with full commitment or don’t do at all, and participants seemed to find it hard to commit their time and energy to it.

If a read a paper I really want to sit down for it and not just read a bit and move on. I need to have a […] timespan of at least twenty minutes. […] And if I have other things to do, well, I skip it. (Nick, 52)

While the PDF-version of the paper was also experienced as bulky at times ("I did think it was a lot of pages, over 200, if you open that you do think 'Oh ha, well, I’ll need to get through that’," Leonard (57)), it didn’t have the same imposing presence the print version had. For Michael (52), who said to be thrilled to receive the print weekend paper, the hurdle to read it became so big that several copies were left untouched on his table.

You see it laying there and it’s a lot, yeah almost a waterfall of beauty, beautiful articles always, but then I have the respect, reverence for it to really take the time for it and I didn’t get around to that. […] I also didn’t make the time.

Jade (24) even felt the confronting presence of her unread print newspaper:

What I don’t miss about the paper is that it was in front of my door every morning (laughs) and that I just had stress like “Shit, there’s another one and I have to read it again.” I just find the [amount] of pages too much then. […] When I came back and saw that newspaper again (laughs) [I] thought, yes that is my paper, so I really feel obligated to bring the paper up and then I put it on the kitchen table and then it does stare it me during dinner and stuff.

While – as discussed earlier – the very material presence of the print newspaper functioned as a visual cue reminding participants to read it, for Michael and Jade it instead overwhelmed them.

• 4. Disillusionment

The fourth obstacle was content-related: participants’ expectations of the newspaper were not met. First, participants realized during the trial period that they simply weren’t so interested in news:

But my goal was actually to read [the news] more often, because I feel I should […] be better oriented in that. But I notice that very often I just don’t find that shit so interesting to read, so I don’t tend to do that so quickly. (Chloe, 23)

This was no indictment of the quality of the newspaper: Chloe just didn’t find it interesting. Since perceived rewards are essential in the habit acquisition phase (Wood and Neal 2009), it is no surprise that negative experiences of the subscription don’t lead to repeated use.

This obstacle also had a temporal dimension: participants felt the print newspaper was old news. Sylvia (20) illustrates:

I maybe had this romantic idea in my head like “Ooh the paper falls on the doormat and then every morning with a croissant and orange juice I’ll go through it entirely and read it. Only I think I did [that] once.” When I read it […] I very often thought “Oh I already knew this.” It wasn’t really news anymore.

For Sylvia, the newspaper had no added value: she had already heard the news elsewhere. Relatedly, participants realized the newspaper was too in-depth for them, as for their information needs brief updates were sufficient:

I don’t need to know all those background things, I just want to be able to talk along with people, that I just know what happened. […] I prefer the highlights from the NOS. (Erica, 26)

The implications are straight-forward: a positive experience of the subscription facilitates repeated use, while a negative experience constrains it.

• 5. Accessibility

Finally, lack of accessibility was an obstacle for repeated use, particularly for digital news (although there were also some newspaper delivery issues). In addition to a handful of participants who didn’t manage to complete their registration in the first place, logging into the news app was a major issue. In particular, there appeared to be a problem with logging in when referred via their Facebook feed.

[I] found it especially annoying that with logging in sometimes it didn’t work. Because then you think, now I have the subscription, now I can read everything, and then you still have to do all those extra actions before you can read the articles. (Lydia, 24)

Joshua (22) previously circumvented the paywall of his subscribed-to newspaper via an incognito browser. Happy that he now wouldn’t have to do this anymore, he found himself continuously logged out:

So actually I already had [access to these articles] and when the trial subscription came, I thought “ay chill,” because now I don’t have to open that anonymous page and can directly open my article. But then after I had logged in and then I had to still log in the second time, I realized that opening the anonymous page was easier than logging in. So I just went back to [using the anonymous browser].

Due to having to log in repeatedly, Joshua returned to his previous tactic of incognito browsing, as that was more efficient. As a result, he also didn’t see the point in having a subscription anymore: “Because I still have [access to] the article, so having a subscription has become completely unnecessary for me.”

Conclusions

Even though research shows that the first weeks after people have subscribed to a news medium largely determine whether a new habit develops (Wadbring and Bergström 2021), we know little about this process from a user perspective. Taking a context-centered approach that decentered participants’ intentions and instead started from the environment in which news was used, this article explored how news users adopt a trial subscription into their everyday routines and identified three facilitators and five obstacles helping or inhibiting this process.

A key finding was the high importance of visibility: participants – even those who had positive initial experiences – tended to forget their subscription. Visibility is key because repetition is essential for habit formation (Lally et al. 2010; Wood and Neal 2009), and visual cues reminded participants (“ah yes!”) to read their subscription. This was especially true for the digital formats, which lacked the automatic visual reminder the print newspaper itself functioned as. Digital visual cues required some form of action from participants, such as installing a news app and placing this app icon in a prominent spot (see also Schnauber-Stockmann and Naab 2019), enabling push notifications, leaving the news site or app open on their laptop or phone, or following the news organization on social media. Since participants received no instructions about implementation (cf. Lally, Wardle, and Gardner 2011; Schnauber-Stockmann and Naab 2019), it is remarkable that they engaged in these implementation tactics proactively, suggesting that even participants themselves were aware of their propensity to forget their subscription. This tendency to forget digital subscriptions due to lack of visual cues could help explain why Wadbring and Bergström (2021) found that a large share of new digital subscribers ended up hardly or not at all reading their paper. Digitally, accessibility also proved important: one bad experience with registering or logging in could cause participants to give up on the subscription completely.

Underlining the relevance of taking a context-centered approach, this study confirms that intentions, while important to launch a news habit (LaRose 2010), play a limited role in the repetition of news use. First, participants were selected on their intention to try out the subscription, but this by no means guaranteed regular or continued use. The same was true for having a positive initial impression of the newspaper’s content. Furthermore, rather than merely having the intention to read the news, it seemed that the participants that succeeded in reading the subscription regularly were those that integrated it into their existing habits. Successful strategies were embedding the subscription into their existing daily routines (stacking) and/or having the subscription take the place of a less desirable habit in the same routine (swapping) (Wood 2019). However, strong existing habits can be both a blessing or curse for news habit formation: the old habit can help anchor the desired habit, or block performance of the new behavior by being automatically cued up by context features. The importance of embedment into everyday routines also aligns with findings that context-related cues are more effective for habit formation than time-based reminders (Stawarz, Cox, and Blandford 2015).

Results also point to the existence of a mental “hurdle” news users must overcome to read the newspaper in print or PDF-format. Participants described having to muster up the cognitive and motivational energy to start, as reading the newspaper was seen as an activity you either truly engage in or don’t do at all. This was true especially for the print newspaper, the very sight of which could already be overbearing. For news app and websites (i.e., not the PDF-version) such mental hurdle was not mentioned, confirming that materiality matters (Groot Kormelink and Costera Meijer 2019; Boczkowski, Mitchelstein, and Suenzo 2020).

Relatedly, this study seems to confirm the effectiveness of rewards intrinsic to the behavior (Wood 2019): participants that used the subscription regularly emphasized the concurrent enjoyability of their news practice. In particular, they enjoyed their reading session as a moment of peace and/or experienced it as more useful than “wasteful” practices like social media checking. While more research is needed, these findings imply that concurrent enjoyment could be more effective for news habit formation than retrospective appreciation (e.g., social rewards in the form of being able to converse with others) (Groot Kormelink 2019). Future research could further explore and test how news media can stimulate concurrently experienced rewards. The results also have implications for news literacy. If part of news literacy is to “enable news consumers to be active agents in the consumption process to effectively seek out news and information (exposure) [and] dedicate the time to news that is important or relevant to them (attention)” (Tully et al. 2021, 12–13), this may also include helping news users understand how to organize their (everyday) environment is such a way that it optimizes, e.g., for delayed rather than instant gratification.

While the results cannot be generalized, it is worth pointing out that certain findings seemed more dominant among younger participants, such as experiencing the concurrent reward of feeling more useful after replacing social media use with news use, and proactively organizing digital visual cues as reminders for news use. It is not unlikely that clearer differences could be identified in (quantitative) follow-up research that takes such variables as age, gender, income and education level into account more systematically. The same is true for formats: while all facilitators and obstacles were found across news formats, more systematic, quantitative follow-up research could shine light on whether some are more frequent for certain formats, as well as how the specific affordances of different news media (e.g., push notification patterns) impact the (potential) habit formation process. These insights could help news media target specific audiences.

Finally, it should be emphasized that this study zoomed in on a very limited part of the news habit formation process: the first three weeks of access to a new subscription. Participants were also somewhat artificially offered a trial subscription rather than them subscribing organically, which might limit the applicability of the results. Future research could further explore the process leading up to developing an interest in and deciding to sign up for a news subscription in the first place, how the habits develop over time, as well as how, when and why subscribers (don’t) go from a trial subscription to becoming a paid subscriber. Ideally, this would take the form of a longitudinal design that follows people who “naturally” subscribed to and used news over a sustained period of time. This would allow for the identification of drivers and obstacles not just of news adoption but of news habit formation.

Acknowledgements

First, I would like to thank DPG Media for providing the trial subscriptions; special thanks to Henrike Reinhardt for her help. I also thank Anne Klein Gunnewiek, Brendan Hadden, Catherine Kleynen, Doortje Linssen, Elisabetta Santangelo, Frederique Blaauw, Laura Otto, Lisa Kiewiet, Niels van den Berg, Bas Jongejan, Fay Degenkamp, Joost Schutte, Madelief Krikken, Murielle Posthuma, Noor van Pelt, Pepijn Keppel, Rosalie Overing, Sanne Harmes, Tibbe Dolman, Ties Wijntjes, and Tosia Hogema for their help with the data collection. Finally, I would like to thank the Digital Journalism Editorial Team as well as the reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).