ARE YOU JUST sick of the news, or is the news actually making you sick? It’s a pertinent question in the age of ‘doomscrolling’. In America, psychologists are already talking about ‘headline stress disorder’ and ‘news anxiety’ as consumers wilt under a relentless barrage of negative news reports - true and false.
The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism recently revealed that the percentage of people in the UK avoiding the news ‘sometimes, or often’ rose from 24 per cent in 2017 to 46 per cent in 2024. That’s getting on for half of those surveyed, and - for any industry - that is clearly unsustainable.
So, what’s going on? Well, before the internet existed, news was delivered in discrete ‘windows’ - in the morning and evening papers and in the six and ten o’clock broadcasts on TV, for instance. It was usually delivered as a set of facts, without much opinion, comment or analysis - and often with a little humour (remember those silly dog-on-a-skateboard pieces at the end of the TV news?)
Then came the ‘world wide web’, and with it social networking and social media apps. This new media quickly put traditional news outlets under extreme pressure with an innovative - and, to be honest, more effective - offer to advertisers. If you were selling trainers for example, a newspaper ad would send your message to a few people who might want to buy them and hundreds of thousands who didn’t. Facebook and Google can actually target people who’ve looked for trainers on line. At the same time, everybody with a smart phone became a broadcaster, unleashing a tsunami of rage and opinion - encouraged by algorithms that thrive on divisive and emotionally-charged content.
As traditional media began to see revenue flowing away down the wires, they opened their own websites and began to compete for clicks and ‘dwell time’. And because journalists since at least the days of Jack the Ripper have understood that bad news holds attention for much longer than good news, a race to negativity began. Some media-outlets (traditional and new) also gave way to ‘rage farming’ - because an outraged reader is at least engaged, and dwell time sells.
The end result is a never-ending carousel of crises: climate collapse, political extremism, war, economic failure, pandemics, murder, fraud, human trafficking and genocide. It’s no wonder that consumers are walking away: the hunger for ‘clicks’ favours the catastrophic.
The good news (apart from the fact that there is quite a lot of good news in the world) is that the traditional media have finally woken up to the fact that it’s not great business to distress your readers, viewers and listeners so much that they walk away - and a long overdue recalibration of what ‘news’ is has begun in newsrooms all over the world.
The idea of ‘constructive journalism’ began in Scandinavia in 2007 after Lisbeth Knudsen, editor in chief and CEO of Berlingske Media, wrote an editorial on the detrimental effects of negativity bias in journalism, and called for more positive and constructive story ideas. Other media in Denmark, France and Spain caught the mood, and constructive journalism based on news with more nuance, context and a focus on solutions became a movement.
Publications like The Optimist began to spring up, along with a handful of positive-only news outlets like the American Good News Network founded in 1997 as a good news aggregator, and - a favourite of mine - UK-based Positive News ‘a rigorously fact-checked’ daily and quarterly magazine owned cooperatively by its readers and offering hopeful stories of progress and social change.
There is even a Positive News Foundation based in The Hague - the international City of Peace - and ‘committed to social progress through positive journalism’.
Some might say that focusing only on the positive is as distortive as focusing only on the negative. That may be so, but put them both together and there’s a chance that consumers might feel just a little less overwhelmed.
Other recalibrations in news delivery include ‘slow’ news and long reads. Slow news - as exemplified by the beautifully designed Delayed Gratification magazine, and Tortoise Media (now The Observer’s) Daily Sensemaker - aims not to be first with the news, but to give stories context and balance. Long reads, or long-form journalism, focuses on in-depth reporting and storytelling often with literary devices like character development, scene-setting and dialogue.
And then we have the fact checkers like BBC Verify and FullFact.org - journalism dedicated to testing for truth in ‘our fragile information environment’.
Are we at the end of ‘news’ as we know it? That’s not for the media to decide - it’s down to the customers. The next generation of consumers has already turned away from traditional media. Gen Z, in particular, is increasingly inclined toward light, social media like TikTok and away from negative topics and tedious political reporting - and they are already affecting the way media outlets operate.
Faced with a lack of trust, editors have started to put ‘ethics boxes’ on news stories, describing the editorial decisions that went into them and according to The Guardian “news outlets across Europe are now exploring ways to make content more personal and less overwhelming for users”. It continues: “Major newsrooms are actively seeking to produce fewer stories to avoid overwhelming users. Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) has launched a product called Kompakt, with the tag line: ‘Read less, know more’.”
Quite where this will all end is anybody’s guess. The fact is that humans have an inbuilt negativity bias - given a positive event and a negative event, we tend to focus more on the negative. And as long as social networks can profit from algorithms that increase user dwell time by whipping up emotions, they’ll carry on doing just that.
An ex-colleague insists that the world would be a better place if all news outlets were immediately closed. I think not: news existed long before newspapers and broadcast media because people want to know what’s going on around them. Forewarned is forearmed. News - good and bad, true or fake - would simply arrive through different channels.
Still, it’s good to see traditional media finally responding to their customer’s needs. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops.
For the record, my own approach to news is to ask: “What really just happened?” You might be surprised at how often the answer is ‘somebody just said something, and we didn’t like it’.