A study of college students’ attitudes toward a paid news content system

Abstract

This study investigated college students’ attitudes toward a paid news content system. It sought to identify factors that may predict such attitudes. To deepen our understanding of news copyright issues, this study also analyzed responses to open-ended questions and identified patterns in such responses. Among the predictor variables, perceiving news as a commodity was the only significant predictor of college students’ attitudes toward a paid news model. The results suggest that respondents’ perception that news is free and easily available from the Internet may be the biggest barrier to implementing a paid news model. Relatively few respondents considered news to be a commodity, though most respondents thought that news is a kind of public service that informs the public and benefits our society. Policy implications, limitations of the study, and recommendations for future research were discussed in the context of news copyright and online news economics.