More than Facts: Understanding the News Avoidance Gap

Today's The New Yorker cartoon by Barbara Smaller makes a great intro to my article on News Avoidance that was recently published by the Center for News, Technology & Innovation - CNTI .

news avoidance is becoming increasingly commonplace, including amongst die-hards who have grown up reading the news daily and those who work in the industry.

Many studies have shed light on the most commonly cited reasons for this trend. News is considered:

• difficult to follow and understand,
• too much effort (low value/return on time investment),
• depressing and has a negative effect on mood.

but I believe that, in essence, the causes can be resumed by:

• Our evolving expectations of service and value,
• Our diminishing personal time, skills, and resources, and resulting behavior,
• Our natural human instincts, which are hardwired and remain unchanged.

Inspired by Barbara Smaller and her illustration, let me illustrate this with a few graphics, screenshots and extracts from my piece:

News as a service and it's value

Each of these “evolved services” either empowers the user and/or increases the ease and efficiency (value) of the service to the user. However, the news industry continues to expect consumers to maintain the same content consumption behaviors and highly value the same historic service, resulting in a user needs gap.

 Hard-wired human instinct

Another component of news avoidance surfaces in the Kübler-Ross Change Curve. The curve depicts the typical emotional reactions to negative news. What happens when we don’t have the skills (media literacy, historic knowledge, geopolitical context, critical thinking), support resources or even the time to start progressing through the stages before being pulled back into shock, denial, frustration or depression by another shock? That is, what happens when we are shocked anew each time we receive a push notification, news alert or engage with the news cycle?

Changing Behaviors

Alongside news avoidance, AI use is rising and becoming an increasingly common user behaviour.

LLMs go beyond the “historic service” approach and deliver a service more closely aligned with current digital consumers’ habits, needs and expectations:

• Short, easily digestible information, zero scrolls required. 
• A prompt box allowing you to dig deeper, or query anything you don’t understand in their response, enabling you to make this information more pertinent and of great value to you.  

This is now the “evolved service standard” digital users expect, and many industry sectors are rapidly adapting to deliver on.

If you're curious to read deeper do check out my article below and let me know what you think.

https://innovating.news/guest-essay/understanding-the-news-avoidance-gap/