Media’s junk food moment
People are switching off from the news. More purposeful reporting might tempt them back.
The news industry is in trouble, and not for the obvious reasons. Falling public trust is a challenge but should be solvable with humility, standards, and hiring people with diverse opinions. Traditional funding models have been disrupted but others are emerging.
Underlying all of this, though, is a much more worrying trend: A large and growing share of the population is disengaging from news altogether. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has observed shrivelling engagement in a range of European and other developed countries, with the share of people describing themselves as extremely or very interested in the news falling by more than 30 percentage points in some markets over the past decade.
In response, social platforms are pivoting away from news, having apparently calculated that falling public interest in “political content” is no longer worth the cost of combating disinformation or the risk of being cancelled. Publishers, which have become dependent on these platforms to reach younger audiences, risk going into a death spiral.
Optimists say this opens a gap for new entrants. “When the fire has ripped through the forest, new trees can grow,” the co-founder of Substack (who obviously has an interest) wrote last week. But for new media brands to succeed they need an audience, and that means overcoming the news avoidance trend.
If it bleeds, it leads
The reasons for news avoidance are not yet fully understood. The Reuters Institute has identified falling trust as a major factor, which is a topic for another day. But it also found that a growing number of people feel “worn out by the amount of news”, particularly in European markets. People reported feeling overwhelmed by the news and anxious about what it told them. This won’t be solved simply by adding new voices, even trustworthy ones.
This feeling, I think, is a product of a shrinking world. We now have access to effectively limitless information, much of it traumatic, which our brains aren’t evolved to handle. People used to experience wars or famines perhaps once a generation. Now most of us in the West don’t experience them at all, but they invade our mental space every time we open a news app.
It’s perhaps no coincidence that among the countries surveyed by the Reuters Institute, famously insular Japan had a far lower rate of people reporting feeling “worn out” by the news, and showed barely any increase in this metric over the past five years. Fretting about faraway conflicts is bad for your mental health.
In this regard, traditional publishing incentives are working against the industry. Good news happens gradually, bad news happens suddenly. Because news by definition is focused on things that are new, it has an in-built bias towards negative reporting that is more likely to burn out consumers. Wars and natural disasters are in; progressive improvements in wealth and life expectancy are out.
Journalists are so used to focusing on bad news that we often fail to promote good news even when there is a clear hook. Last week, the European Commission revealed that the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions fell by more than 8% in the year to 2023. This remarkable achievement could help counteract feelings of climate helplessness, but it was barely covered.
Speed is another publishing incentive that has turned negative with new technology. In the days of print, journalists would have to meet a daily deadline but could spend the time until then improving their story. With the move to round-the-clock news coverage, the daily deadline has evolved into a series of chaotic sprints, relegating nuance and thoughtfulness. This can be useful for policy or business readers but doesn’t particularly serve the public interest.
Most publications have their roots in daily deadlines. Even the word ‘journalist’, in its linguistic root, means ‘one who writes daily’ (though I wouldn’t suggest that weekly writers rebrand as ‘hebdomadists’, lest our readers suspect us of deviancy). Almost all legacy publications, weeklies included, have attempted to increase the speed and volume of their output over the past decade.
From scarcity to abundance
At some point during this evolution, information went from being a scarce resource to an abundant one. Within a generation or two, people who once struggled to afford enough of it found themselves at risk of consuming more than they could healthily process.
In that sense, information is following the path set by another crucial resource: calories. For an idea of how the news might evolve, then, it’s worth looking at the modern culture and economics of food.
The first thing to note is that the change was disruptive. Almost every country that flipped to calorie abundance has suffered a crisis of obesity, which many of them are still battling. This was accompanied by an abrupt shift in status signifiers: Consuming too much, once a sign of wealth, became associated with a lack of self-control or the inability to afford healthy food.
Similar social dynamics are emerging in the information space. People who read tabloids, who watch daytime TV, who scroll aimlessly on social media, are derided in much the same way as those who eat junk food. Aspirational people even talk of ‘detoxing’ from junk media and signal their consumption of long reads, documentaries, podcasts and books.
If history is a guide, the habits of the aspirational classes will spread throughout society. In this case, being up-to-date with the latest headlines will no longer be the symbol of a responsible citizen who is informed about the state of the world. It will signify a person who has become distracted by a constant parade of new things rather than learning deeply about a smaller number of important things – and who is ill-informed as a result.
For new media, the lesson should be clear. If you want to attract high-status consumers who will influence others and are more likely to pay for news, don’t serve them endless junk. Serve them slow-cooked ideas, serve them delicacies from far-off places, serve them things they’ll want to share with their friends.
And above all, invest in good cooks.
The image illustrating this article is AI-generated.