A new report from the Reuters Institute & Oxford University has found that interest in the news cycle has dropped. In the US the proportion of people who are "very" or "extremely" interested in news has fallen from 67% in 2015 to 47% last year — a trend that was also found in other countries such as the UK, Spain, Germany and Brazil.
Why is this happening?
There are a few potential explanations. One is just that we're all exhausted by the news cycle of the last few years which has featured highly polarized politics, a global pandemic, inflation and geopolitical tensions to name but a few stories. Another potential reason is more structural — that as news is increasingly digital it's actually easier to get disconnected from it, through choice or by algorithms that learn you're not that interested. Interestingly the proportion of people who actively avoid the news also rose to a new high of 42% of those surveyed in the US.
Related data: Our friends at Axios visualized the fade in the "Trump bump" — which saw both left-leaning and right-leaning news sites gain website traffic during his presidency.
P.S. Interest in chart-based newsletters is actually rising.
