I’m part of a worldwide trend, with women and men showing different tendencies
It’s a big event in journalism when the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism releases its annual Digital News Report. This year’s edition had loads of data on “news avoidance,” or people actively avoiding news. (Survey methodology here.)
A confession. It’s a bit embarrassing for a journalist like me to admit it, but I avoid certain news.
It began during the endless 2020 U.S. election campaign and its violent aftermath. The new president had taken office, but the old one and his allies were claiming fraud. Now we were in the territory of lawyers, judges, injunctions, lawsuits, investigations, televised shouting matches, and a flood of news and opinion.
For the past three years, some opinion columnists and broadcasters have talked about almost nothing else, every single day.
The attention economy
Why all this pontificating, predicting, and propagandizing? These media have business reasons for fighting for our attention, and they often drown out the public service of responsible reporting.
The reason for all this noise is in the nature of our current media ecosystem. We live in the attention economy: “It refers to the range of economic activities based on people’s attention being treated as a scarce and highly desirable resource to be captured and maintained (emphasis mine).”
Because attention is scarce, it is valuable. Every media organization — big or small, reputable or untrustworthy — is using every tactic at hand to engage us.
They need our attention to sell ads and subscriptions, to create value for their brands so we will become loyal consumers of their products.
The result of all this battle for our attention?
‘News fatigue’
The Reuters study, which covered 47 media markets on six continents, shows a steady worldwide decline in “interest in the news” over the past decade. Under the headline, “Attention loss, news avoidance, and news fatigue,” the report states:
Since we started tracking these issues, usage of smartphones has increased, as has the number of notifications sent from apps of all kinds, perhaps contributing to the sense that the news has become hard to escape. Platforms that require volume of content to feed their algorithms are potentially another factor driving these increases (emphasis mine). — Reuters 2024 Digital News Report, p. 27.
What I really dislike about most of the notifications is that they are worded in such a way as to trigger fear, anxiety, envy, or even hatred to get us to click. The motive is to show advertisers a huge number of “users”. They are not thinking about what those users might want to know or need to know. They are thinking only about their business results.
And that brings us to the chart below, which maps the results of these tendencies in 10 countries on four continents. Media consumers are turning away from the news.
Chart below explained. All 10 countries show a decline in “interest in news,” except Finland. Those on the left had bigger declines than those on the right. The “pp” in the chart refers to percentage points, so Spain’s -33pp means that news interest among Spanish consumers has declined by 33 percentage points over the past decade. In the list to the right, interest in news in the USA has fallen by 15 percentage points over the past decade.
Why the decline?
Another group of Reuters survey respondents in 10 countries was asked the following question in both 2019 and 2024:
Please indicate your level of agreement with the following statement: I am worn out by the amount of news there is these days. (Sample size in each of the countries listed was at least 2,000).
The results show large increases in news fatigue in eight of the 10, most notably in Brazil, Spain, Germany, and Denmark. Only Japan and the USA were almost unchanged.
The survey also asked respondents to explain their answer:
“The sheer volume of information is overwhelming. We can be left feeling helpless in the face of another remote disaster, leaving you feeling guilty and impotent.” Male, 71, UK
“There’s too much news nowadays … some are fake and some are real, but I get confused and get a headache.” Male, 27, USA
The way forward, from the data
Let’s return for a moment to the first chart that showed declines in “interest in news” in 10 countries. The Reuters report notes, “Women and young people make up a significant proportion of that decline,” p. 26.
I believe results from several of the survey questions suggest ways for publishers to engage more women and young people.
- For example, comparing women and men: women selected “mental health and wellness” and “the environment and climate change” among their top five topics of interest. These topics did not rank among the top five for men.
- Women share men’s interest in “local news”, “international news”, and “crime and security.” However, their preferences did not include “sports news,” “political news,” or “science and technology.”
- Women under 35 showed an interest in “lifestyle or culture.” Men under 35 did not. They wanted to know more about “business, financial, and economic news.”
- As for young people, survey respondents aged 18 to 34 did not show interest in “political news,” which ranked among the top five topics of interest to those 45 and above.
- However, roughly a quarter of the young people expressed interest in “the environment and climate change”. This topic did not register among the top five among those 35 and above.
Astute marketing directors ought to be able to figure out ways to take advantage of these coverage gaps to attract and keep new audiences.
If you need more ideas, here are suggestions from Reuters: read this excerpt from their book on news avoidance and this piece with seven practical things that journalists can do to fight it.