The Loyalty Collapse
The news industry is facing the same crisis as soap and soda. The consequences are just a lot worse.
Trust in the news continues to tank.
We all know that. We spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to build it back.
But there’s a much bigger threat emerging that we’re not talking about nearly enough. It’s the collapse of loyalty.
Every single consumer category is experiencing this right now. Soap. Soda. Sneakers. Fast food. Except for news, the stakes are fundamentally different. We don’t just need your trust to rebuild the business. We need your habit. We need you to come back day after day.
The reality is loyalty is vanishing in the news industry, too. Readers are ghosting paywalls. Audiences are hopping between media outlets as if they were changing channels. The business is used to churning subs almost as fast as it can get them.
Let me tell you a story that shows what this looks like on the ground.
A couple of weeks ago, a city council was debating how to spend tens of millions in federal dollars. Halfway through, one of the council members stopped everyone. He pointed out that there was nobody in the room from the media.
“It’s not like we’re going to do anything wrong,” he said. “But if nobody’s watching this, in my mind it’s a problem. The public’s watchdog isn’t here.”
That room wasn’t empty by accident. It was a symptom of this dual crisis.
The data on this is clear. In a recent SAP Emarsys survey of over 10,000 consumers, just 29% said they had “true loyalty” to the brands they buy from, down five points in a single year. Over a quarter of U.S. consumers say they “can no longer afford to be loyal,” and two-thirds have switched brands just to save money.
The same pattern is happening in news. Pew and Gallup polls show trust in media at historic lows. People are skeptical of the accuracy, the bias, and the motives of news outlets. And once trust is gone, loyalty goes with it.
When no one’s watching the city council meeting, corruption gets easier. Mismanagement goes unnoticed. Democracy depends on an informed public, and an informed public depends on someone doing the informing. When the business model for that work collapses, so does the civic infrastructure.
Soap can run on deal-chasers and brand-switchers. Journalism can’t.
One newsroom leader described to me how they’d seen longtime subscribers drift away not because of bad coverage or rising prices, but because they were “mix-and-matching” their news—a local site for politics, a national outlet for investigations, social feeds for everything else. It was more like grazing.
Consider the Tampa Bay Times. In 2023, the paper’s owners admitted that despite maintaining quality journalism, they were hemorrhaging subscribers. The problem wasn’t quality. It was that readers felt no need to commit to one source when they could cobble together free alternatives. This story is playing out everywhere, from legacy metros to digital upstarts.
Why This Combination Is So Dangerous
The revenue model depends on both. Trust gets someone to pay attention. Loyalty gets them to pay and then keeps them paying. When both collapse, the system breaks.
“I can no longer afford to be loyal” hits harder here. That’s a killer sentence for an industry asking for $10 to $15 a month. News competes with Netflix, Spotify, and groceries. It’s losing to products people consider essential.
Switching costs are almost zero. News has near-perfect substitutes that are free. There’s no friction. In a 2023 Reuters Institute study, most participants under 30 couldn’t remember the source of a single story they had read that week. Only the platform registered. The brand didn’t matter. The reporting didn’t matter. All that registered was the scroll.
The trust problem makes the loyalty problem unfixable. The traditional toolkit—discounts, points, perks—isn’t going to cut it. Research says people now want “clear, personalized value” and to “feel understood.” But how do you personalize news without being accused of bias? How do you make people feel understood when half your audience thinks you’re lying?
Why This Is Structural, Not Cyclical
This isn’t a temporary pullback. It’s not people cutting back during a recession who will return when things stabilize. It’s generational, ideological, and economic.
Generational: Younger audiences never built loyalty to news brands in the first place. According to Pew Research, only 16% of Gen Z adults regularly get news from print newspapers, compared to 48% of Baby Boomers. They’re not abandoning a habit—they never formed one.
Ideological: Trust has fractured along partisan lines. In a September 2023 poll, Gallup found that only 11% of Republicans trust mass media, compared to 58% of Democrats. That 47-point gap makes building a broad-based news organization nearly impossible.
Economic: The ad model is broken. Subscriptions are expensive. And there’s no third model that scales. What’s changing isn’t just consumer behavior. It’s the category itself. “I get my news from a trusted publication” is being replaced by “I get information from wherever it finds me.”
The Civic Stakes
Here’s the part that should worry us most.
When trust collapses, people stop paying attention. When loyalty collapses, they stop paying for news. When both collapse, the business model fails.
And when the business fails, the civic role of journalism—to inform, to hold power to account, to sustain a shared public reality—goes with it.
It’s one thing if people switch toothpaste brands. It’s another if they switch off the press.
The loyalty crisis isn’t just about the future of the news industry. It’s about whether democracy can function when nobody believes in or sticks with the institutions designed to inform it.
What Comes Next
The industry is scrambling for answers. Some outlets are experimenting with nonprofit models. Others are doubling down on hyper-local coverage. A few are exploring membership models that emphasize belonging over access.
But none of these experiments have scaled.
And the clock is running out.
The question isn’t whether the loyalty collapse will hit journalism. It already has.
The question is whether anything can be rebuilt in its place.
And whether we’ll figure it out before too many city councils meet in empty rooms.
This is one of the most complex challenges facing not just the news industry, but our civic life. What are you seeing in your own media consumption habits? Do you feel loyal to any news sources? Why or why not? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
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