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The percentage of people who selectively avoid news has reportedly reached 39% globally. This is an increase of 10% in less than a decade.
Blissful ignorance or doomscroll-induced anxiety? Pick your poison.
It’s no secret that the state of the world is causing mass panic. Cost of living is on a continual ascent, the climate situation is perilously grim, war crimes are occurring on a daily basis, the threat of terrorism keeps simmering, and youth violence remains rife.
As someone whose job it is to keep on top of global events minute-to-minute, it can be utterly soul destroying to sit and endure the daily barrage of negativity before the kettle has even finished boiling for a morning brew.
Working in publishing, I and my colleagues’ experiences are obviously magnified, but our growing feelings of exhaustion and powerlessness are also reflected globally.
According to an international survey by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, the proportion of people who avoid the news to some degree has reached a whopping 39% – three percentage points more than last year, and 10% more than 2017’s figures.
Over the last decade, the number of people reading mainstream news on websites or through social media declined significantly across all age groups. The survey breaks this population into three groups: former news consumers scaling back, those who have never engaged with news, and folk who have lost trust in traditional news institutions.
The looming threat of becoming obsolete has reportedly sparked newsrooms into life globally, and many are said to be frantically strategizing to recapture people’s attention. Digital analytics experts, however, suggest the fall may purely be a sign of the times with the changeable nature of social media algorithms convoluting avenues to news appearing in the first place.
As such, newsrooms are pivoting towards making curation king. Newsletters highlighting a handful of stories are taking precedence over spamming hourly updates, and podcasts fleshing out a particular subject in more detail are proving fruitful in driving engagement up. Whether this approach is just a plaster on an open wound remains to be seen, though.
The BBC is so concerned by its own drop-off, it is currently creating a whole new department centred around using AI to drive personalized content to the public. Its chief executive, Deborah Turness, recently described the change as ‘defying gravity’ in the way news will soon be consumed.
It’s a bold play, given AI is fighting its own battles of public mistrust and cynicism. The UK’s largest news broadcaster is essentially betting the house on technology that YouGov statistics show has the trust of only 28% of Brits – as of February 2025.
Craig T Robertson, of the Reuters Institute, isn’t so sure this punt will come off either. Speaking on the curation idea pinched from social media algorithms, he stated: ‘We tend to find that people aren’t so keen. If you’re personalizing a news feed or news homepage, there’s a sense that they’re missing out on other things. It’s not like music or movies.’
