Benjamin Toff, an associate professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication and director of the Minnesota Journalism Center, studies news audiences and political engagement, public opinion, and changing journalistic practices. He also is the author of Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism. 

Toff will be discussing his research on news avoidance and trends for 2025 on my Newsroom Transformation Initiative Town Hall, set for December 18.

We got a chance to catch up in advance of his presentation, and here’s an abridged version of our Q&A.

What lessons do you think the U.S. election taught media companies about trust in news and/or news avoidance?

I’m not sure the election itself taught any clear lessons for the media companies. A lot will depend ultimately on how the next few years go with a second Trump administration, and some of those lessons may only then become clear in retrospect. 

One thing that did seem striking to me is the degree to which both campaigns devoted considerable portions of their time to trying to reach voters who don’t consume much legacy media. 

The Harris campaign was criticised by many in the news media for not spending enough time doing conventional media interviews with television journalists. And while some may say that was a miscalculation on the campaign’s part, I strongly suspect they were making an accurate assessment around what is ultimately a good use of the candidate’s time in trying to maximise the likelihood of their reaching the kinds of voters they needed to reach. 

This is also why both campaigns were devoting so much of their attention toward the end of the campaign to talking with influencers and reaching voters through podcasts. As the mass audience for legacy media continues to erode, the campaigns know they need to look elsewhere to reach and engage with undecided and persuadable voters. 

That should be a pretty scary indicator to media organisations about their own relevance.

I’ve been seeing and hearing sentiments like this Nieman Lab piece about people changing news consumption or avoiding news post-election. How big of a problem do you think this will be, and what can we do about it?

It remains to be seen whether it’s a problem or simply a healthy course correction. There is always some reversion to the mean after people binge on news during moments of peak interest. And the degree to which the industry has spent the last couple of decades trying to game the system to get people to click more and spend more and more time with their content was never a sustainable strategy in the long term.

Most people don’t want to spend every waking hour of their lives following news, fueled by a bottomless pit of anxiety and a need to know the next incremental bit of information about one crisis after another. 

I think news organisations are going to have to be more thoughtful about catering to what audiences are actually looking for, which has a lot more to do with the quality of the time they spend paying attention to news rather than quantity. They want to know what is actually important to know, and in the most efficient manner possible, so they can focus on all the other things in their lives they care about.

The Reuters Digital News Report suggested that news avoiders can be engaged and brought back with more focus on solutions and explainers. Has your research shown the same?

This is very much an open question. The only empirical data we really have on what works to engage with news avoiders is based on what people say they want, but we don’t know if that will actually work. People are notoriously pretty bad at explaining why they do habitual things or predicting how they might change their behaviours in the future. 

Certainly I do think media organisations are making a mistake if they think they can just disregard what news avoiders are telling them. You can only double down so many times on the small niche audiences of already engaged news lovers you’re already serving. We know the ranks of people actively avoiding news keep growing. 

That said, our research has suggested that adjusting the content of news is likely only part of the equation. It doesn’t do any good to produce more explainers and solutions journalism content if news avoiders never encounter it, don’t see the relevance of this coverage to the context of their lives, and don’t have the bandwidth to engage with it. 

That’s why in our book we focus more broadly on a host of other factors we argue are driving news avoidance beyond merely the content of news — things like the role of the platforms and media pathways people rely on to follow information in the news, ideas they hold about what news is and how and why it may or may not be trustworthy, and the communities people belong to that reinforce the social benefits around paying attention to news and making it easier for people to make sense of what they are seeing. 

These are harder for news organisations to change, but interventions that only involve tinkering with content aren’t likely to move the needle if you aren’t grappling with these broader forces.

How do you see news avoidance changing in 2025, if at all?

There aren’t a lot of indications that the patterns we’ve been seeing over the last decade are likely to change in 2025. In the U.S., in the aggregate I expect these trends may well accelerate in the face of what looks to be a very contentious new series of political crises. On the one hand, as in 2017, there will likely be segments of the public who lean in, whose insatiable appetite for news may lead to a bit of a “Trump bump” in ratings or pageviews. 

But that deepening of engagement from one part of the public will only mask a deeper stratification among the public as a whole. Many more people I expect will tune it all out from frustration and resignation and from what we’ve elsewhere described as “anticipated anxiety” that many news avoiders feel when it comes to thinking about the news.

This is ultimately a self-defeating way of thinking about engaging with news, but I don’t see indications so far of any sort of turnaround.

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