For the first time this year, we have asked about why people access the news. Across all markets the most important reasons were to ‘know what’s going on in the world’ and also ‘to understand how news may affect me’.

In Germany, the UK, and Denmark habit is a key driver of usage, while in Italy and the United States there is a strong motivation around the duty of the citizen to stay informed. Only a quarter of our Danish sample (24%) agrees that passing the time is a key motivation – compared with a third in the UK (35%) and the United States (31%).

News Lovers, as one might expect, have much stronger motivations to access news in general and are far more driven by habit (80%) than Casual Users (50%).