Why are you avoiding the news?

Overall interest in news has been declining in Switzerland in recent years. Keystone

Record numbers of people are turning away from news. Is this due to general news fatigue, mental health worries or mounting concerns about the use of artificial intelligence (AI)? We dug deeper into the latest Digital News Report – and found some surprising facts about Switzerland. 

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The Digital News Report 2024External link, published by Oxford University’s Reuters Institute this week, documents the scale of the challenges facing media organisations in 47 countries, including Switzerland, based on surveys of around 100,000 people.

A key takeaway this year is that news avoidance is at record levels. Almost four in ten (39%) people worldwide said they sometimes or often actively avoid the news. This is up from 29% in 2017.

“You’ve had the pandemic [and] wars, so it’s a fairly natural reaction for people to turn away from the news, whether it’s to protect their mental health or simply wanting to get on with the rest of their lives,” the report’s lead author Nic Newman told BBC News.

Some people feel increasingly overwhelmed and confused by the amount of news, while others feel tired by politics, he added.

In SwitzerlandExternal link, 36% of respondents said they refrain from consuming news at least some of the time (+3% compared to last year’s report). But this represents an increase of 10% compared to before the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Overall interest in news has been declining in Switzerland in recent years. In 2024, 48% of respondents said they were very interested in news. This was two percentage points more than in 2023, but 11% less than in 2016.

“So-called news deprivation [hardly using news in everyday life] has increased in Switzerland, but at the same time the group of intensive news users has not increased,” Linards Udris, a researcher at the University of Zurich who contributed to the report, toldExternal link the persönlich.com website.

+ Traditional media continue their decline in Switzerland

The proportion of “news avoiders” is higher among women (39%) than men (33%). Research shows that many women do not feel sufficiently represented in the media, according to Udris.

“Many women do not feel addressed by the topics and the type of reporting. They prefer to experience news in the form of receiving it from friends,” he said.

Should we trust the media?

Meanwhile, overall trust in the news remains steady at 40%, but is still 4% lower than it was at the height of the pandemic, the survey said.

In Switzerland, trust in the news was slightly higher, at 41%. But this is nine percentage points lower than in 2016. The Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SBC) and its regional units SRF and RTS continue to be the most used and most trusted brands, followed by the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), Tages-Anzeiger and Le Temps newspapers. The SBC is SWI swissinfo.ch’s parent company.

Another challenge facing news organisations is the general unwillingness of audiences to pay for news subscriptions. Following some growth during the pandemic, just 17% of respondents across 20 countries said they paid for online news, a figure that has been unchanged for the past three years, the report said. The figure for Switzerland was also 17%.

A significant proportion of news subscribers are also likely to be paying discounted rates due to trials or promotions. In Switzerland 47% pay less than the full price for their subscriptions.

Globally, the report found that audiences for traditional news sources such as television and print have declined over the past decade, with younger people preferring to get their news online or via social media. Video is becoming a more important source, especially with younger groups. 

In Switzerland, almost three-quarters of people (74%) said they get their news online, compared with 51% for television and just 34% for print. The number of readers of printed newspapers has fallen by almost 50% over the past decade.

Around 37% of Swiss get their news purely from social media, down ten percentage points compared to 2016. The most important social media platform for news is WhatsApp (25%), followed by YouTube (23%), Facebook (20%) and Instagram (17%), with figures remaining steady.

Worldwide, news usage is increasing on newer platforms such as Instagram, Telegram and TikTok, while it falters on older social media platforms such as YouTube and Facebook, the report shows.

“Young people in particular seem to feel more addressed by these offerings,” said Udris. On these platforms, people say they do not necessarily consume news from professional media, but from personalities or influencers.

Impact of generative AI

The use and impact of artificial intelligence (AI) in media organisations is also a hot topic. Newsrooms globally are considering what to do about generative artificial intelligence, as tech companies like Google and OpenAI build tools that can offer summaries of information and siphon traffic from news websites.

The Reuters Institute report found widespread growing public suspicion about how AI might be used in reporting, especially for hard news stories such as politics or war.

“There is more comfort with the use of AI in behind-the-scenes tasks such as transcription and translation, in supporting rather than replacing journalists,” the authors added.

In Switzerland, industry-wide guidelines have been formulated, and all big media companies have appointed heads of AI, created specialised AI departments, or launched processes to implement AI.

+ Swiss press freedom worsens despite climb in rankings

But in a 2023 studyExternal link, Swiss respondents indicated they would not pay for AI-generated news, believing that the use of AI allows media companies to reduce costs.

This year’s Digital News Report also highlights concern about disinformation on the internet. Worries about what is real and what is fake when it comes to online news has risen by three percentage points in the past year with around six in ten (59%) saying they are concerned. This figure was higher in South Africa and the US at 81% and 72% respectively, as both countries hold elections this year, the report said.

Edited by Balz Rigendinger/ts