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News avoidance is a trend that has had the industry concerned for the last few years. In the last Reuters Institute Digital News Report, 41 per cent of Britons said they sometimes or often avoided the news, citing mental health, negative news and information overload as some of the top reasons why.
A new book - Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism - shines a light on the people who almost never read the news.
In this week's podcast, we speak to one of the authors Benjamin Toff, assistant professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication, director of the Minnesota Journalism Centre, and the former lead of the Reuters Institutes' Trust In News project.
What drives people to avoid the news at all costs and is there anything newsrooms can do about it? Tune in to find out.
The social contract btw journalism and much of the public is fraying - news use is declining, interest in news down, avoidance widespread.
— Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (@rasmus_kleis) January 16, 2024
Based on surveys and 100+ interviews w/consistent news avoiders, we look at why, and what it means when people live largely without news 2/9 pic.twitter.com/AYulsKoGp3
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