The Audience of Swedish Local Online Newspapers - A Longitudinal Study

We have conducted a partly longitudinal study using online questionnaires at four Swedish local online newspapers in two different studies. The objective of this paper is to describe the users’ demographics and reading habits as well as the users’ expectations of current and future issues regarding the online edition. We also discuss online questionnaires having tried three different approaches to receive as many answers as possible. We have found that the subscribing readers of online editions have increased from one forth to more than a half of the audience, and concluded that the subscribers and nonsubscribers have different reading habits. The findings also show that almost two thirds of the respondents are men and more than 80% prefer the paper edition of the newspaper. The results indicate an interest for a multimedia paper edition for the future.