News? No thanks, not really interested

By Julie Starr | Published: January 27, 2008

Roy Greenslade does a piece on research that confirms what we already know: fewer people are buying newspapers. But it also shows that fewer people are consuming news full stop.

Yes, a lot of people turning off the TV and ditching the paper are going online. But an awful lot are just getting on with their lives without being too bothered about catching a daily news package. The headlines are enough.

This is something I want to come back to a lot this year. I think it’s the elephant in the conference room: People aren’t interested in news. Is there anything we can do about that? Is it because of too much information so people are switching off, because people are tired of beatups and headlines that fail to deliver in the story below, too much personality and fluff and repetition and flashiness? Or is it something more than that?

In the same vein as Roy’s blog post is this heartfelt piece in the Washington Post by veteran reporter David Simon.

He asks: “Isn’t the news itself still valuable to anyone? In any format, through any medium – isn’t an understanding of the events of the day still a salable commodity? Or were we kidding ourselves? Was a newspaper a viable entity only so long as it had classifieds, comics and the latest sports scores?”

Good question.

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  • Jon

    I am not convinced by the argument that people are consuming less news. To my mind there has never been more news available in the media or being consumed. I think the issue here is that the traditional news sources are seeing dramatic audience declines.

    It is not long ago that the newspaper and the six o’clock news were the main source of news for most people, supplemented potentially by short radio bulletins (generally lifted whole or in part from the previously mentioned).

    These two main news vehicles have been cannibalised in the last ten or more years by a plethora of new news sources. We have seen a massive proliferation of new channels available of TV, the same is true of radio and finally the advent of the internet and mobile as news sources. This does not suggest a lack of interest in news per se, actually quite the contrary. Apart from sport and porn, news has been the content that has driven the most proliferation of new channels across all media.

    I think if it was possible to define the reach of news across all media in a given day or week I believe it would be little changed even perhaps ahead.