Over the past three years, we have talked a lot about news avoidance and news fatigue, and for good reason. The trend around news avoidance and news fatigue is growing, and presently, we are looking at about 38% of the public having become news avoiders, and all the way up to two-thirds who are expressing some form of news fatigue.
So, this is a very serious problem.
But, as a media analyst, there are two fundamental issues I often come across, with how publishers deal (or don't deal) with it. One is what this is blamed on, and the proposed solutions to that. The other is that news avoidance is not just about the people who do it, it impacts every other element of being a publisher too.
So, in this deep dive, we are going to talk about both of these things, and generally address how to do something better about this.
Let's (not) blame someone else
The first thing we need to talk about is 'blame'. In the media industry, there is a very unhealthy obsession on blaming other people for our own problems, and when it comes to news avoidance, not only is that the wrong focus, it also misdirects publishers towards solutions that are more likely to make things even worse.
When you think about it, this is not surprising. Imagine you owned a restaurant and people were avoiding it. If you then started to blame that on others, how likely would that be to convince people to come back?
The answer is zero.