• by Sara Guaglione , August 8, 2017

Beyond their websites, news outlets born online find email newsletters a necessary part of reaching their audiences, according to a digital news fact sheet released Monday by Pew Research Center.

The report looked at 36 digital native news outlets that originated online (not the website of a legacy publication) and averaged at least 10 million monthly unique visitors in the fourth quarter of 2016.

Pew examined, in part, the sites’ different audience strategies to increase outreach and engagement. It found 97% of these outlets use email newsletters to reach their audiences.

Some 92% have an official presence on Apple News, the mobile app and news aggregator popular among news publishers to monetize mobile readership.

However, digital native news outlets are not increasingly building their own apps. The percentage of these sites with an app remained steady between 2016 and 2017, at 61%.

The report also found three-quarters of the digital native news outlets have podcasts and 61% allow comments on articles.

Social media is also a big part of reaching audiences for these sites. All have official pages or accounts on Facebook and Twitter, and nearly all are on YouTube and Instagram, at 97% and 92%, respectively. Just 25% have an official channel or account on Snapchat.

Pew has issued an annual report on the state of the U.S. news media industry since 2004. This year, it is rolling out a series of digestible fact sheets, each covering a different part of the industry.

The outlets included in the digital news fact sheet are: 247Sports, Bleacher Report, Breitbart, Business Insider, Bustle, BuzzFeed, CNET, Deadspin, Digital Trends, Elite Daily, FiveThirtyEight, Gizmodo, HelloGiggles, Hollywood Life, HuffPost, IBTimes, IFLScience, IGN, IJR, Mashable, Mic, Opposing Views, Politico, Quartz, RawStory, Refinery29, SB Nation, Slate, The Daily Beast, The Verge, Thrillist, TMZ, Topix, Uproxx, Upworthy and Vox.