It is therefore no coincidence that over the past three months since the coronavirus pandemic started, confined to their homes, audiences have been flocking to credible sources of online news.
The New York Times, the world's biggest online news subscription service, gained 587 000 new digital subscriptions during the first quarter of the year to the end of March alone.
For the next two decades, most publishers rather adopted a logic of giving news away for free online, leaning heavily on advertising income supported by reader revenue from their print editions.
The latest digital news report by the Reuters Institute at Oxford University, shows that there has been a significant increase in payment for online news in a number of countries, with those who subscribe saying they pay for the distinctiveness and quality of the content.
"Just as lockdown and social distancing have encouraged people to discover the time benefits of shopping online, people are in the process of discovering the value of digital news over print news.
