The proportion of people selectively avoiding the news is now ten percentage points higher than it was seven years ago, reaching a new high of 39% across 20 key markets.

This is the highest level of news avoidance recorded since the Digital News Report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism began in 2012. Previously the high was 38% in 2022.

In the past year selective news avoidance has grown by three percentage points. The biggest increases were in Ireland (up by ten percentage points to 44%), Spain (+8pp to 37%), Italy (+7pp to 36%), Germany (+5pp to 37%), Finland (+5pp to 26%), the US (+5pp to 43%) and Denmark (+4pp to 23%).

The proportion of people in the UK saying they actively avoid the news sometimes or often is up from 24% in 2017 to 46% in 2024 - the same level as in 2022 although it had seen some improvement to 41% in 2023.

The UK was ninth highest for news avoidance out of 47 markets surveyed. Top of the table were Bulgaria (60%) and Greece (59%).

Just 25% of the 2,017 UK respondents to the Digital News Report survey said they never avoid the news these days.

News avoidance was a bigger phenomenon among women, of whom in the UK 52% said they sometimes or often avoid news compared to 41% of men.

It was relatively even across age groups, affecting 49% of 25 to 34s, 35 to 44s and 45 to 54s. It was also reported by 43% of 18 to 24s and 44% of 55 and overs.

News avoidance triggered by 'depressing' and 'relentless' cycle

One 45-year-old woman in the UK told the Digital News Report: "World news is far too depressing at the moment with most news channels reporting on the same things."

The report added that the news is not just "depressing" - it's "relentless".

Four in ten (39%) people across all markets said they felt "worn out" by the amount of news nowadays, up from 28% in 2019, with coverage of "wars, disasters, and politics" all cited as squeezing out other areas.

"The increase has been greater in Spain (+18pp), Denmark (+16pp), Brazil (+16pp), Germany (+15pp), South Africa (+12pp), France (+9pp), and the United Kingdom (+8pp), but a little less in the United States (+3pp) where news fatigue was a bigger factor five years ago.

"There are no significant differences by age or education, though women (43%) are much more likely to complain about news overload than men (34%)."

The report suggested the increased use of smartphones, push notifications and algorithm-based platform feeds since the Digital News Report began as potential reasons for this overload.

A 71-year-old man in the UK said: "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."

And a 27-year-old man in the US told the survey: "There’s too much news nowadays... some are fake and some are real, but I get confused and get a headache."

Finland is only country not to see long-term decline in interest in news

The long-term trend in interest in news is down in every country surveyed apart from Finland. In the UK interest in news has almost halved since 2015, with a fall from 70% saying they were extremely or very interested in news then to 38% this year.

"Women and young people make up a significant proportion of that decline," the report said.

The UK's was one of the biggest drops in percentage points, alongside Spain (down from 85% in 2015 to 52%) and Argentina (down from 77% showing interest in news to 45%). However a short-term stabilisation in Argentina (it was lower, on 43%, last year) was put down to presidential election in late 2023.

However, not all countries saw such a big drop in interest. The US, on 52% this year, was down from 67% in 2015 but up from a low of 47% in 2022. The Netherlands and South Korea saw single-figure long-term falls in interest.

Finland was the only country not to see decline in the long-term, going from 64% showing interest in news in 2015 to 65% this year.

Survey respondents were asked what types of news topics they were most interested in. Local and international news were the two most important for all age groups, but while political news was third for 45s and overs, it did not make the top five for 34s and unders. They were more interested instead in environmental and climate change news.

People felt that their interest in topics like sport, politics and business news was generally well met, but that areas like education, environment and social justice were lacking.

Could 'user needs' models help reduce news avoidance?

The Digital News Report noted that numerous newsrooms around the world have introduced "user needs" models aimed at making the news more accessible and engaging by supplementing news updates with stories that "educate, inspire, provide perspective, connect, or entertain".

Almost three-quarters (72%) of people across all markets said news that keeps them up to date with what's going on was most important to them, followed by news that educates them (67%) and news that offers different perspectives (63%).

The report said: "This is pretty consistent across different demographic groups, although the young are a bit more interested in stories that inspire, connect, and entertain when compared with older groups.

"In the United States, for example, over half (52%) of under 35s think having stories that make them feel better about the world is very or extremely important, compared with around four in ten (43%) of over 35s."

The report authors said of the survey data that "taken as a whole, it is clear news consumers would prefer to dial down the constant updating of news, while dialling up context and wider perspectives that help people better understand the world around them.

"Most people don’t want the news to be made more entertaining, but they do want more stories that provide more personal utility, help them connect with others, and give people a sense of hope."

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New Zealand’s Stuff “abandoned” the traditional inverted pyramid structure for its “most contentious” stories as part of its battle against news avoidance.

Stuff.co.nz introduced a sentiment tracker asking readers for their emotional response to stories and discovered that changing the way certain stories were written had resulted in “much less negative” emotions.

Ben Haywood, chief product officer at parent company Stuff, set out the newsbrand’s response to news avoidance at the recent INMA World News Media Congress in London.

The traditional inverted pyramid approach to news begins with a ‘hard intro’ where readers are given the most important information first – the who, what, when, where and why of the story.

But for stories that could sow division, Stuff has instead decided to adopt a softer explainer-style approach that leads people into the most important and contentious elements of a story, including subjective takes on it, further down.

For example a story published on Monday about a politician’s online newsletter byline being edited to include a derogatory term began with the sentence: “Has National MP Maureen Pugh been the victim of a hack?” And another political story began simply: “Te Pāti Māori wants to set up its own parliament.”

Three-quarters of Kiwis avoid news to some extent

A report about trust in New Zealand news published in April found that about 75% of those surveyed said they actively avoided the news to some extent, up from 69% a year earlier.

Last year’s Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that 36% of people across markets said they avoided news often – two percentage points lower than in 2022 but seven percentage points higher than 2017.

Haywood said news avoidance was a “real threat” to Stuff’s mission “to help make New Zealand a better place”.

“You couldn’t get a better mission for an organisation. It requires, though, our journalism to have impact – and for our journalism to have impact it needs to reach people.”

He said Stuff data backs up the news avoidance report, with people “consuming fewer sorts of news and spending less time”.

One reason for the growth in news avoidance, he said citing the report, was that people were “finding us boring and repetitive, and a lack of variety from day to day and between publications.

“But also they’re finding us biased or opinionated and feel fed up by opinion masquerading as news or bias or perceived bias… But then also really importantly, they’re seeing us as a threat to their mental health.

“They’re seeing that negativity in our news either in the subject or the way that we’re handling it. And they consider us to be emphasising conflict and division.”

He continued: “So how are we thinking about that at Stuff? Less as a problem, but more as a signal from our audience that they want to have a healthier relationship with news.

“So our starting point is we think mindful news consumption is a good thing and we want to find ways to support them to have a better relationship with the news. How might we give people more control of their news experience? How might we ensure that people can trust Stuff with their mood and with their wellbeing?

“If the way that news avoidance is showing up in data in New Zealand is people choosing fewer sources, how can we make sure that we’re the source that they’re coming to?”

Stuff sentiment tracker gets thousands of reactions a day

This is why, Haywood said, Stuff developed a sentiment tracker that asks readers to choose an emotion at the bottom of each story – although it can be turned off for the most sensitive articles – to show how it made them feel. The options are “happy”, “angry”, “concerned”, “sad”, “like”, and “don’t care”.

People can also choose to write extra detail in response to the question: “Why did this story make you feel that way?”

“This is generating thousands of reactions every single day and a really deep data set for us to understand and a new human data point for our newsroom to consider alongside its other metrics,” Haywood said.

Generally speaking, stories about art, music and culture, cute animals, resilience and bittersweet stories make people feel happy. They like it when national rugby union team the All Blacks win, as well as stories about food, travel and local issues. They are concerned about climate change, housing affordability and the cost of living. Stories about the All Blacks losing, natural disasters, cost of living and floods make them feel sad. They feel angry about unfairness, injustice, government policies and agencies. And they claim not to care about celebrities.

Haywood said this data is used to look at how broader topics are performing and how people respond to them, as well as the more traditional data for individual stories.

“It also allows us to see how people or brands or issues in the news are changing over time,” he said.

“Because it collects this data in real time, it’s also allowing us to think about how we might provide more thoughtful recommendations to people based on how they feel. So for example, if we’re seeing that people are feeling really down and out after a tough climate story, how might we recommend something that’s a bit more proactive and solutions-focused as their next story.”

The data also has commercial applications, Haywood said, which is “really important to us, because we found that advertisers can be news avoiders too.

“That was displayed really graphically to us when last year we published a story that Google didn’t consider safe for its advertisers. It was on the homepage and our programmatic ad revenue dropped until we could find that story and figure out what the problem was.

“But we also see this anecdotally in our conversations with advertisers and their discomfort sometimes around some of the topics that we’re covering. The sentiment tracking data has allowed us to have a more sophisticated conversation with our advertisers about their brands, about their industries and how they’re being perceived in the market. And those have been great conversations that have led to new business for Stuff.”

Stuff ‘not shying away from difficult stories’

Editorially, the newsroom is “taking really great care not to amplify conflict” and this has meant a change in the way stories are written.

Haywood referred to a quote from Stuff.co.nz editor-in-chief Keith Lynch, who said: “Journalists have been taught for years to put the most important piece of information in the lead paragraph of a story. But sometimes this is swapped out for someone’s subjective view of an issue or topic.

“This can sometimes mean we are incentivising simplicity and amplifying conflict over helping our readers understand a complicated topic that impacts their lives.”

Haywood said: “So how does the newsroom deploy this? In a really, really simple way that didn’t even require the product team to build anything, which was awesome.

“They have abandoned the inverted pyramid for some of the most contentious stories and politics stories and planning stories, things that would often sow division, and taken more of a real-time explainer approach to structuring those stories.

“And it’s been really effective. The stories are getting just as much engagement, but the debate that’s happening in the comments is much more civil, and the responses we’re getting from a sentiment perspective are much less negative.”

However, Haywood added that these changes are “not about shying away from difficult stories.

“It’s about organising ourselves to hold people’s attention so when we do have difficult stories to tell they have impact.”

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The UK has one of the lowest levels of trust in news as well as one of the highest levels of news avoidance, according to a new study.

The 2023 Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that trust in news in the UK was just at 33% – joint 12th lowest among the 46 markets studied.

Interest in news meanwhile has sharply declined from 70% in 2015 to at 43% this year as neither the war in Ukraine nor the cost of living crisis had led to sustained interest and trust levels in news.

News avoidance, a key concern for news leaders, remained high as audiences continue to selectively avoid news. Over a third (36%) of people across markets said that they avoided news often, which was two percentage points lower than last year but seven percentage points higher than 2017.

While the proportion of people avoiding the news often or some of the time was lower in the UK this year compared with 2022 (41% vs 46%), the UK continues to have one of the highest rates on this measure.

The UK also had one of the highest shares of people who said that they were totally "disconnected" from the news, with 9% of people saying they did not consume any news in the previous week. Only Japan (17%) and the US (12%) scored higher, while the share in Germany was also 9%.

News avoidance: What people avoid and why

Younger and hard to reach groups were particularly likely to say they were less interested in news, while people in countries that were more politically divided also avoided the news more. Greece, which the report noted has recently seen heated debates about press freedom and independence, recorded the highest rate for news avoidance jointly with Bulgaria: 57% in each country said they sometimes or often actively avoided the news.

This year the study took a closer look at how people avoided news and why. Just over half (53%) of people who said they avoided the news reported that they do this in a broad-brush way by, for example, ignoring news in their social media feeds or switching off the television when the news came on.

Others tried to check news less often, for example by disabling news alerts on their phones (52% of avoiders), while another group (32%) avoided news on certain topics that they considered to be depressing, emotionally draining or "too repetitive".

News avoiders were most likely to skip over stories on the war in Ukraine (39%), national politics (38%), social justice (31%), crime (30%), and celebrity news (28%).

Report lead author Nic Newman said: "It is clear that many websites and apps are optimised for those that are super-engaged with every twist and turn of today’s news (and politics) agenda. But these approaches also seem to be turning large sections of the public away – with potential long-term implications for civic and democratic engagement."

The report said that while there was no simple solution to low engagement with news, less sensationalist, more positive, and more explanatory formats could help.

Link between falling trust and news avoidance

One factor contributing to the decline in engagement has been falling trust. Across all the countries looked at, trust in news fell by two percentage points, reversing some of the gains made during the pandemic. Some 40% of people said they trusted news most of the time.

In the UK, among the 2,107 people surveyed online, trust has fallen to 33% from 51% in 2015. Finland was the country with the highest level of trust at 69%.

Among 15 leading UK newsbrands asked about, the BBC was most trusted with 61% of people saying they trusted the BBC, compared to 21% who said they did not. The public broadcaster was followed by two other broadcasters, Channel 4 News (59% trust) and ITV (58%).

Along with national broadsheet titles, all UK public broadcasters increased their trust levels in the last year, although the BBC remains down from its 2018 trust level of 75%.

Least trusted was The Sun (13%) and fellow News UK property TalkTV (20%). The Mirror was third-least trusted (23%).

The research linked low levels of trust with criticism of news media, finding some of the highest levels of media criticism in countries such as the UK, Greece, Philippines and US where trust in media was low.

While politicians or political activists were often cited as a source of media criticism, in the UK survey respondents were most likely to say that they had seen criticism of the press from celebrities, comedians and social media personalities. Prince Harry and actor Hugh Grant who has been a proponent voice in the Hacked Off campaign are among the UK’s most outspoken press critics and both have ongoing litigation against national newspaper publishers.

The study also looked at what consumers think about how news they are shown is selected, with most of the public sceptical of the use of algorithms to select the news shown through search engines, social media, and other platforms.

People who trusted news more, or were very interested in news, were however more likely to say that both algorithmic and human selection of news were good ways of choosing stories. Half of those who strongly agreed that they can trust most news most of the time said that automatic selection based on past consumption habits (52%) and selection by editors and journalists (55%) were good ways to get the news.

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The chief executive of UK-based newsletter startup The Know understands “why people avoid the news” – but wants to entice them in with solutions journalism, issue-focused story selection and a dash of positive news.

The Know has 50,000 subscribers across its daily newsletter and a weekly Friday digest. Most of the subscribers are women, and most have signed up in the past year.

Boasting an open rate of 46% on the daily newsletter, Anderson Clark said the outlet’s readership is growing at a rate of approximately 10% a month.

The Know has evolved from This Much I Know, founded by Emily Sheffield in 2018 with the assistance of startup accelerator Founders Factory before she became editor of the Evening Standard. At the time, the brand focused on simplifying the news largely through an app and its Instagram feed.

It evolved into a newsletter publisher hoping to combat news avoidance following the arrival of chief executive Lynn Anderson Clark, who had moved to Founders Factory after a year leading global partnerships at Tortoise Media and, before that, a decade working in finance, digital media and partnerships at NBC Universal in the US.

She told Press Gazette: “The Thomson Reuters Institute out of Oxford has a stat that says 46% of Brits have actively avoided the news sometime in the past year…

“That’s the fact that gets me up in the morning. Because I understand why people avoid the news.”

She said that at cocktail parties “my thing” is to ask people: “‘How’s your relationship with the news?’

“It’s a weird question. I’ve never run into somebody that says: ‘It’s wonderful! Thank you for asking.’ And we’ve got to change that. We’ve got to keep people informed and empowered.

“And literally, my husband is like: ‘You can’t ask people that at cocktail parties.’”

Explaining why she ditched The Know’s app shortly after taking over, Anderson Clark noted that “the top apps people use are always social media and things that are useful”, for example, fitness trackers.

“And news apps are actually quite low. So even when you think about incredible, big companies like the BBC and The Guardian, those apps are rarely in the top ten apps people use, because people are so invested in their own social media and things like that.

“And I felt, when I looked at that data like if the BBC and The Guardian… aren’t breaking that upper echelon, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do that either.” She did decide to keep Instagram as a “shop window” into the newsletter, however.

Fighting against ‘human nature’ in news readership

Anderson Clark attributed news avoidance to a negativity bias among consumers, saying people are more likely “to click on something that’s a bit more salacious – and that’s human nature”.

The Know’s answer to that impulse was “fighting against human nature, in a way… We read many, many sources. We’ll read five, ten sources on a story, figure out where the middle is, where the facts are, stripping back the editorial[ising]. And we write about the issues that matter most to our audience.”

The Know also uses a consistent structure. Each newsletter begins with what Anderson Clark called “the cheer-me-up” – a positive news story, for example the birth of critically-endangered piglets at a zoo in Torquay.

“We’re not a positive news outlet,” Anderson Clark said. “That’s not how I want to be characterised. But we do start there.”

She said: “Oftentimes when I speak with our readers [the cheer-me-up is] their favourite bit – like a little treat. When they open it up, they know they’re not just going into something terrible.”

“Story one” is “the biggest story of the day” but although this might involve war or disasters, Anderson Clark said the aim is to focus on something that doesn’t leave the reader despondent. She gave the example of the February earthquake that struck Syria and Turkey.

“All the news outlets were covering death counts, right? What we do is: of course, we have to understand the impact of the earthquake… But how we covered that story was: ‘World rallies around Turkey to help.’

“Because the world absolutely mobilised… And it’s the same story. You’re still coming away informed about what happened, how it happened, but you’re leaving with ‘people are helping’, and you can leave with that silver lining, rather than just the death toll kind of splashed across your face.”

Story two is “generally something about topics that our readers would care about that might not be front page elsewhere”, for example, women’s health, mental health or sustainability. Anderson Clark said that audience research indicated 87% of The Know’s readers donated time or money to a cause over the previous year.

Each newsletter also features a series of news-in-briefs, a news-themed trivia question and a “We’re loving” feature, which suggests a product or service recommendation from one of The Know’s six staff.

The formula appears to be working: Anderson Clark shared some of the “five to ten” supportive emails she said the outlet receives from readers each day.

“Your newsletter is a lovely way to get in the news without being overwhelmed. So thank you. ”, said one email.

Another said: “I’ve only been [reading] a short while but I really appreciate your approach, it’s great. I actually find I engage with the news in a much healthier, more effective way based on the content of The Know. So thanks, I think you’re doing a great job.”

Long-term sponsorships will be ‘crucial’

With 50,000 subscribers and an open rate of almost 50%, The Know is now likely reaching around 25,000 people – most of them young British women – on a typical weekday.

Anderson Clark said the newsletter’s growth picked up in earnest in October. “It was ticking along, and then in October something happened. A lot of it’s word of mouth – and we do have an incredible referral programme as well.” 

The Know’s editor, British Journalism Award-winner Kate Samuelson, similarly told Press Gazette in January that Cheapskate, the newsletter she launched with Georgia Weisz, had grown to 10,000 subscribers largely through word of mouth.

[Read more: How newsletter for thrifty Londoners built a 10,000 person audience by word of mouth]

The Know’s referral programme, which launched in November, is another similarity. Whereas Cheapskate encourages sign-ups through weekly giveaways, The Know does it through a “referral rewards” scheme, awarding increasingly generous prizes the more friends a reader invites.

The Know is not yet breaking even, and for now, makes revenue mostly from “one-off sponsorships. We just partnered with Universal Studios, we just partnered this month with Bumble. So amazing brands, which we’re super proud of, but I want to get away from one-off…

“Moving from these one-off, one month things to six months to a year is going to be crucial in the longevity and sustainability of our business,” Anderson Clark said.

She added: “For me, information is power. And my goal is to get that information to as many people as possible.”

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