"Despite the increase of three percentage points between 2019 and 2020, in terms of payment for news online, Portugal continues to stand out as one of the countries in the world where you pay less" for news, which represents "a strong threat to the survival of the news ecosystem that the Portuguese say they trust so much and that they use so often throughout the day", reads the report.

This year the Digital News Report Portugal (DNR PT 2020) is launched on the same day as the Digital News Report Global (DNR), with the big general trends for Portugal and equalling the global trends in several points, says the OberCom / Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

"The data for 2020 come as a result of a wasteful trend observed between 2017 and 2019, where the proportion of Portuguese people who claim to pay for news in digital format fell from 9.5 percent to 7.1 percent", pointing out that " 2020 was the year in which the symbolic barrier of having more than one Portuguese person for every 10 paying for 'online' news content was crossed."

This is a "trend that we expect to be growing, given the strong investment made by brands in terms of digitising their business models", the report said.

Among the different forms of payment, according to DNR PT 2020, "the subscription to an 'ongoing' news service continues to stand out, regardless of the payment periodicity (36.5 percent), and the payment for news through subscription of another service (34.5 percent)".

It should also be noted that "72.9 percent of those who pay for news in digital format do so on an ongoing basis, that is, they are financially committed over time to the content they are consuming".

Another relevant fact "to better understand the small sample of Portuguese people who pay for 'online' news, is that they are potentially much more active consumers of news than the Portuguese in general, in terms of frequency of consultation of the different brands".

With regard to the areas of sport and economics / finance, "the audience among respondents who pay for news online (regardless of the brand they pay for) is practically double that observed among Portuguese in general".

The Reuters Digital News Report 2020 (Reuters DNR 2020) is the ninth annual report of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) and the sixth report to have information about Portugal.

With regard to social networks, Facebook is the preferred platform for the Portuguese, with three quarters of respondents saying they use it for general purposes and half for news consumption.

"The YouTube streaming platform comes in an outstanding second place, less than 10 percentage points away, having been used by 68 percent of Portuguese people", the report stresses.

"It is also worth mentioning the predominant role that instant messaging 'apps' have in the Portuguese daily life. Both properties of the Facebook, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger universe consolidate their role in the Portuguese social landscape 'online', with the emergence of Instagram network in a fifth plane", he adds.

This year, "the proportion of Portuguese who use WhatsApp increased by 11.8 percentage points, from 47.4 percent to 59.2 percent", while in the case of Instagram, this increase was seven percentage points, from 39.6 percent in 2019 to 46.6 percent in 2020.

In the case of the social network Twitter, "there was an increase of 3.7 percentage points in the same period, from 11.7 percent to 15.4 percent".

These three networks recorded "gains in terms of users for news consumption, 2.8 percentage points in the case of WhatsApp, 2.3 percentage points in the case of Instagram and 3.1 percentage points in the case of Twitter".

"High levels of confidence in the news, concern with what is real or fake on the Internet, increased power of the big platforms in the distribution of news, the 'smartphone' gaining distance in relation to the other devices for accessing online news, the Portuguese interest in news broadcast by the regional media, the continued increase in podcasts and the importance of television as a news source are highlights" of the DNR PT 2020 released on 16 June.

The survey was carried out in 40 countries, the total sample size was more than 80,000 adults, about 2,000 per country, and fieldwork was carried out between January and February this year.