Choosing words wisely

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Faced with another broadcast outside Number 10 Downing Street for yet another address from the prime minister amid seemingly endless indicative votes, you might have felt tempted to reach for the remote. Almost three years on from the referendum, Brexit had reached saturation point.

While we felt we had to keep tuning in to stay on top of events, it was hard to devote the attention required and the protracted debate and wall-to-wall coverage seemed to leave many of us feeling exhausted. According to Britain Thinks’ most recent Brexit research, 83% of respondents said they were ‘fed up’ of seeing it on the news every day. Moreover, 64% agreed that ‘anxiety about Brexit is bad for people’s mental health’.

It seems news fatigue is bearing out on the other side of the Atlantic, too – according to Pew Research Center, almost seven in 10 Americans feel ‘worn out’ by the amount of news they get.

But while some are clearly jaded by the B-word, it isn’t necessarily leading us to switch off – 35% of UK respondents in Edelman’s latest trust survey claimed to be reading, watching or listening to the news more than they used to.

So, what does this Brexit behaviour say about our relationship with the 24-hour news cycle? Are people changing how they engage with news or switching off altogether?

Sophie Harding, trends and insights director at Mindshare, says people are becoming more informed about their relationship with media and technology – and when it comes to news, making an effort to read more widely.

“People are doing a lot more research around news – they’re not taking a story at face value any more. They’re reading more sources of news to verify things.”

Rather than simply switching off, the agency’s research suggested people are taking a more tailored approach to media: 54% of participants said they were making more conscious, deliberate choices about ‘the media they consume’, while a third said they avoid the news altogether because it is too ‘doom and gloom’ and 31% claimed to be paying closer attention to where they get their news.

“There’s more awareness of how media works,” says Harding. “People have gone off and done their thinking behind the scenes because they’re seeing more coverage of things like Cambridge Analytica and GDPR and they want more detail. It opens up their minds and makes them a bit more thoughtful about the choices that they’re making.”

Conscious consumerism

Researcher Jodie Jackson spent a decade studying the impact of media consumption on wellbeing after becoming increasingly disillusioned by the news, despite wanting to stay informed. “I went from someone who watched the news daily to someone who couldn’t stand it,” she says.

“I began changing my media sources and being a lot more deliberately conscious about the way I consumed the news to get a more balanced and accurate picture of the world,” says Jackson. She discovered solutions-based journalism, which typically includes stories about innovation and responses to social problems.

After changing her ‘media diet’, Jackson began a Master’s in positive psychology to understand the role concepts such as hope and optimism play in encouraging people to act on the information they take in, and has written a book on the subject – You Are What You Read. Her research found that, rather than being apathetic to world affairs, people were switching off because the news made them feel depressed and hopeless.

It comes as people are increasingly aware of what they consume and the impact on both their health and that of the planet – the rise of veganism being one example. Could this extend to monitoring our news intake?

“There’s a difference between being a consumer and being a conscious consumer,” says Jackson. “When you’re a conscious consumer, you become more deliberate – you might even inconvenience yourself for deeper values behind the decisions you’re making.”

While fake news and misinformation have become pressing issues for government and the media, Jackson isn’t advocating switching off from media – it’s about becoming more selective.

With an infinite amount of news published daily – Jackson cites the Washington Post’s 500 stories a day – staying informed comes with the trade-off that we have the sense of never being finished. There’s always more to read and always further to scroll.

“We’re both over-supplied and under-informed. That combination makes me want to tune in less often, and go in more deeply,” says Jackson.
Tom Johnson, managing director at insight and foresight consultancy Trajectory, says the company hasn’t seen any evidence of people choosing to use technology less – rather, we develop mechanisms to “manage the intrusion better”.

However, he adds: “The attention people pay to politics has fallen very sharply over the past year. Outside of Westminster and those fascinated by politics, people are bored of Brexit; in the first three months of 2018, 39% said they paid a great deal of attention to politics, for the same period this year that was 20% (Deltapoll). This could be the environment in which other kinds of journalism become more valued.”

Slowing down

A new breed of media outlet has emerged to capitalise on this information overload, adopting a ‘slow journalism’ model of publishing fewer stories in greater depth. Tortoise Media, the news start-up established by former Times editor and BBC News director James Harding, promises to run no more than ‘five concise pieces’ in its ‘slow newsfeed’.

While it remains to be seen whether Tortoise will be commercially sustainable, there seems to be an appetite for a more sedate, considered approach – as shown by titles such as Delayed Gratification and the increasing popularity of long-form podcasts (see boxout).

Denise Turner, director of insight at newsbrands marketing organisation Newsworks, says the on-demand media landscape has given people more choice, but this means people are more discerning in what they watch or read. “Media is now any time, any place. There aren’t such fixed times when people do things any more. People can choose what they want to do when they want to do it. If you’re going to invest your time, you want to make a good decision.”

Neuroscience research commissioned by Newsworks found that when people made a choice to consume a particular medium, rather than just happening across it, they were more engaged with what they were reading.

Questioning faith?

Declining trust is often cited when exploring people’s relationships with media. But an Ipsos report in January found no evidence for a crisis of trust in the media globally – in fact, trust in the BBC was higher than it was in 2004. However, the research did find issues with trust in digital platforms, which muddies the water slightly, with so many getting their news via social media.

Indeed, Ofcom’s 2018 report on media consumption found that at a platform level, measures of quality, accuracy, trustworthiness and impartiality are strongest among readers of magazines and weakest among social media users.

Rather than not trusting media, could it be that with a gluttonous menu of potential sources, people gravitate towards what they know and identify with, as they look for a sense of certainty?

Reach (formerly Trinity Mirror), has been conducting research with insight agency House 51 on how different types of media perform against the ‘Sense of Community’ index, a measure used in social science to gauge feelings of community.

It found that news brands – across digital and print, both nationally and regionally – scored more highly than other media for community values. “News brands have an identity – they stand for something,” says Andrew Tenzer, director of group insight at Reach. “We live in a world where, because of social media, bias is considered a bad thing – actually, bias is really comforting to people. You’ve a firm idea of what your news brand stands for and you go there because it aligns with your world view.”

In contrast, while social media platforms are grounded in the idea of ‘community’, Tenzer argues that they lead to ‘context collapse’ because they are lacking the established norms and boundaries of offline communities. “The context and certainty that exists in real communities just collapses.”

Reach is also trying to understand whether its audiences, particularly younger audiences, actually want to read a cross-section of viewpoints. Tenzer is sceptical: “I’m not sure that people are that rational that they want to read different opinions – I could be wrong.”

The role of social media in creating myopic ‘echo chambers’ has been blamed for the rise of identity politics. But is it simply human nature to want to revert to those we already agree and identify with? Theodora Sutton, a DPhil student at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute, says her research with a community in California found that people there were “avoiding news partly because they were left wing and the news featured a lot of troubling information to them, and news updates were so much more frequent than they used to be”.

Whether people are switching off or not, self-preservation is becoming more important as we become more aware that consuming lots of information is not the same as being informed. With so many question marks over the country’s  future, there is a role for longer-form, thoughtful journalism, Turner thinks. “In a world where there’s a lot of uncertainty, people need to know ‘why’ and have a bit of analysis. I don’t just need to know what the latest vote in the Commons was – what does it mean? It’s not that people are always desperately interested in politics, but people want a bit of guidance.”

This article was first published in the July 2019 issue of Impact.