Growing numbers globally are disengaging from news despite unprecedented access. Use is down, interest in decline, and news avoidance on the rise. In this talk, we share findings from our new book Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism (Columbia University Press, 2024) on why – and what can be done about it. We show that news avoidance, most common among disadvantaged groups, is about both content and broader structures of everyday life: who people are, what they believe, and how technology platforms increasingly shape relationships with news. Overcoming news avoidance, we argue, requires meeting people where they are, figuratively and literally, and we offer research-informed suggestions for how to do this.

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