As many news organizations have worked in recent years to reach audiences that have at times felt increasingly fickle and apathetic, a lot of attention has focused on news avoidance. A great deal of excellent research has been published on news avoidance, some of it highlighted in this newsletter, looking especially at who avoids news, why, and how. (Some of the best of this work, including a new book, has been done by the international team of Benjamin Toff, Ruth Palmer, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen.)
On one level, news avoidance is an extremely simple concept that’s exactly what it sounds like — people avoiding the news. Yet it’s easy to think of low (or nil) news consumption as a proxy for news avoidance. And it makes basic sense as a proxy — avoiding the news means you don’t consume much of it, so news avoidance is a good way to think about the non-consumers that news organizations are trying to reach, right?
Not quite.
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