What Good Is the News?
How to approach a never-ending torrent of information
Charlie Warzel had a typically insightful piece in The Atlantic the other day, in which he argued that journalists’ complaints about the role of social media in distributing the news may be misplaced. Sure, Facebook and Twitter have had a negative impact on the news business, but…
It’s not just the platforms: Readers are breaking up with traditional news, too.
Last week, the Pew Research Center published a new study showing that fewer adults on average said they regularly followed the news in 2021 or 2022 than in any other year surveyed. (Pew started asking the question in 2016.) There’s some shakiness when you break down the demographics, but overall, 38 percent of American adults are following the news closely, versus a high of 52 percent in 2018. This tracks: In 2022, Axios compiled data from different web-traffic-monitoring companies that showed news consumption took a “nosedive” after 2020 and, despite January 6, the war in Ukraine, and other major events, engagement across all news media — news sites, news apps, cable news, and social media — was in decline.
So maybe the issue isn’t that social media is keeping people from discovering the news. Maybe the issue is that fewer Americans are interested in following the news in the first…
