Stop the Presses!

How big a role does the news play in your life? Is being well-informed an important part of how you think of yourself? It was for Edward McCann, a Canadian lawyer and university professor, who died in April at the age of eighty-four. “He found joy in watching and coaching sports,” his obituary read, “spending time with his wife and daughter, and staying informed about the latest news from around the world.”

The nineteenth-century philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel saw staying informed about the news as something akin to a secular religion. “Reading the morning newspaper is the realist’s morning prayer,” he wrote. Whether one is praying to God or reading the paper, after finishing, “one knows how one stands.”

I can relate to that. I’ve been reading the morning paper my entire adult life. My day doesn’t feel started until I’ve completed at least one section. My own obit might well include the words “news junkie.” But I am also a dinosaur. If you’re holding this essay in your hands while you’re reading it, you probably are too.

I get my news the old-fashioned way. This magazine is one of eight print publications that I subscribe to. However, according to the latest Digital News Report, prepared annually by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, the proportion of Canadians who list print as a source of news has declined from 36 percent in 2016 to just 14 percent today.

I also subscribe to half a dozen online newspapers and magazines. The Reuters report found that only 14 percent of Canadians pay anything for online news. I get a lot of my news content from television, too, mostly CNN and CBC. But the share of Canadians who list TV as a source of news has fallen from 71 percent in 2016 to 53 percent.

In the United States, the Reuters researchers found, more people list social media and streaming sites like YouTube as a news source (54 percent), overtaking TV news (50 percent) and news websites or apps (48 percent). This is the first time social media has topped TV as a news source, and it clearly won’t be the last. In Canada, TV still leads, but the gap between people who get their news there and those who choose social media is shrinking — from 23 points a decade ago to 9 points today.

I remain a social media resister when it comes to my news. I like it fact-checked and verified, and that’s generally not what social media platforms do. I have no major beef with the honesty, independence, accuracy, and fairness of mainstream media. That’s partly because I spent more than four decades working deep within it, as a current affairs producer and documentary maker for CBC Radio. But something happened to me over the past year or so that I found surprising and that compelled me to try to better understand it: I stopped feeling any “joy” in being a news junkie.

For the first time in my life, I found myself turning away from the news, not because I found it too slanted or because I lost interest in trying to know and understand the world around me. Rather, the stories that are the staples of today’s coverage — wars, climate change, sexual abuse, crime, racism, terrorism, drug overdoses, creeping authoritarianism, violence, and traumas, both current and historical — all made me feel some combination of mad, sad, or bad, and, perhaps more importantly, left me feeling helpless and hopeless. I had become what journalism scholars and nervous media executives are calling a “news avoider.”

It turns out that there are a lot of us — and more all the time.

The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2025 found that a record 40 percent of people worldwide avoid the news “sometimes” or “often.” That’s up from 29 percent in 2017. Meanwhile, the share of adults who are “very” or “extremely” interested in the news has been sliding — to just 48 percent in 2023. Looking back, I think my own path to news avoidance began with Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Feeling angry and helpless, I started to avoid reading about the war and changed the channel when stories about it aired.

Then came the senseless slaughter of innocent Israelis on October 7, 2023. Everyone in my circle of family and friends was transfixed by the images and could talk of nothing else — except for one close friend who had served in the IDF and was now living in Canada. He stayed clear of the coverage. He didn’t want to read or talk about October 7, and I chose to join him. I also boycotted stories of the ferocious and deadly Israeli response that followed, killing tens of thousands of people in Gaza. Links to articles, podcasts, and videos went unopened. There was nothing I could do to stop the unfolding tragedy on both sides, so why torture myself? I felt I knew all that I needed to know.

The dreaded comeback of Donald Trump followed soon after. In the weeks leading up to the November 2024 election, I spent two or three hours a night watching CNN’s campaign coverage. Jake, Wolf, Laura, and Anderson were my companions. But when Trump won, I quit cold turkey. No more CNN. No more late-night talk shows filled with political monologues. No Jon Stewart or John Oliver. I used to have an insatiable appetite for election post-mortems. Not anymore.

I found myself relating to the American journalist and self-confessed news avoider Amanda Ripley, who wrote in a Washington Post column in 2022 that “all individual action felt pointless once I was done reading the news. Mostly, I was just marinating in despair.” I started watching more sports and movies, and I read more novels. I still felt well-informed. I still spent time with the paper every day but only select parts of it. I didn’t cancel any subscriptions. I just wasn’t obsessing on the news the way I always had. I could now relate to all those people who tell pollsters that the news is too scary and too bad for their mental health. It was a strange and oddly liberating feeling.

I’m an unlikely candidate for news avoidance. According to the Media Technology Monitor, a Canadian technology data firm, the people most likely to avoid the news are women (35 percent, compared with 23 percent of men) and those between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four (38 percent), not people like me over sixty-five (19 percent). University-educated Canadians are less likely to be news avoiders, as are those who get their online news from newspaper sites or apps as opposed to social media (25 percent versus 47 percent).

The 2021 Digital News Report found that no single variable is more predictive of whether someone consistently avoids the news than their interest in politics and civic affairs: their level of what political scientists call “political efficacy.” If your political efficacy is high, you feel that political and social change is possible, and that you can help bring it about. If you don’t feel you can make a difference, you’re not likely to engage in politics, vote, or follow political news closely. News avoidance, researchers say, is almost non-existent among people who claim an interest in politics.

Really? I worked on my first political campaign when I was seventeen. At CBC Radio, I covered elections in both Canada and the United States. In our five federal election campaigns between 2004 and 2015, I wrote “reality check” columns for CBC.ca. That involved carefully scrutinizing speeches and ads. You can’t get much deeper into the political weeds than that.

Today my political efficacy remains high. I would never consider not voting. I think politics is important and that individuals can make a difference. So it wasn’t a lack of political efficacy that was keeping me away from the news. It was a desire to maintain sanity in an insane world.

A survey published by the Media Technology Monitor in 2023 found that nearly 30 percent of Canadians actively try to avoid the news, because it negatively affects mental health (21 percent) or because it reminds them how scary the world is (19 percent) or because the news is too negative (19 percent). That survey was conducted between mid-September and mid-December 2022, when the war in Ukraine was just a few months old, the Middle East was relatively stable, and Trump seemed more likely to wind up in a jail cell than in the Oval Office. What would those numbers look like today?

On a purely practical level, I knew that if more people like me stopped following the news and, more importantly, stopped paying for it, that would be a major blow to the already precarious business model of mainstream media. The potential negative consequences of news avoidance go way beyond the economics of an industry, though. An uninformed citizenry is more prone to accept misinformation as truth, is more vulnerable to conspiracy theories, and is generally bad for the future of liberal democracy.

So however great the temptation might be, news avoidance may be a luxury that the present moment cannot afford. As The New Yorker’s David Remnick recently argued, “To choose to turn away, to shut off the news, is to indulge in self-soothing.”

Wait a minute: What’s the matter with a little self-soothing now and then? Since when is prioritizing mental health considered a bad thing? It’s not as if my news consumption or my avoidance was going to change anything. The news would keep happening whether I was there to watch it or not.

Is it possible for me to be a news avoider without feeling that I am being irresponsible? Absolutely, according to Stephanie Edgerly, a professor at Northwestern University’s journalism school. Having studied news avoiders for about fifteen years, Edgerly believes that we are not a monolith. “The biggest distinction that someone needs to first make when talking about news avoiders,” she told me recently, “is their relationship to consuming news.” In one corner are regular consumers who decide they need to pull back, at least temporarily. Some do it selectively, choosing to avoid certain stories, while others might avoid the headlines before bedtime or on weekends. Others go full avoidance for a limited period. None of this concerns Edgerly. In fact, she supports it. For these people, “news avoidance becomes almost a practice that they have to do in order to continue consuming news.”

In other words, a detox can actually be a healthy thing for heavy news consumers. (Many journalists I know go into full avoidance mode when they’re on vacation.) Yes, it can be hard to do. It can disrupt normal routines and isolate you from friends and co-workers, but it’s for a good cause: you. Democracy won’t die in your absence, and chances are you’ll be back.

That’s what seems to be happening to me. With Trump’s musings about annexing Canada and April’s federal election, my political and news junkie juices began to flow again. I am not completely back and probably never will be (there are still a lot of stories I avoid), but I am definitely inching away from avoidance mode.

It’s the news avoiders in the other corner who worry researchers like Edgerly. These people don’t live in a cocoon; they can be active on social media and consume all kinds of non-news media. They often care about what’s going on in their communities and beyond. But their windows into those worlds don’t come from the news, especially not political news. News avoidance is so ingrained in their media habits that they don’t even have to work at it. Edgerly calls these people the “un‑audience,” and their numbers are large and growing.

Edgerly and her colleagues have identified three groups who are disproportionately represented in the un-audience: young people, women, and those with lower income and education levels. She thinks the un-audience is about 30 percent of the population, although in the case of younger generations, the number could be as high as 50 percent of that group.

In Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism, from 2023, three academics surveyed more than a hundred un-audience members in the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Spain to find out why they don’t engage with news content. In a nutshell, respondents found the news to be unpleasant, untrustworthy, impenetrable, and unrepresentative.

Many women said they simply didn’t have time for the news given their work obligations and the unequal distribution of domestic responsibilities. They were also more likely to claim that news was bad for their mental health. Those with lower incomes or lower levels of education were less likely to have jobs where knowing the latest news mattered very much. They also said they rarely see themselves or their issues reflected in the news. Similarly, young people said they rarely saw themselves or their concerns in news stories. They claimed the coverage was uninteresting and dull, even though many had little first-hand experience with it. They also believed that there was no need to be actively seeking out news, because if anything really important was going on, “news will find me.”

One of the most common complaints among all news avoiders was that the news couldn’t be trusted. This was particularly true of political news, which was widely seen as biased, unreliable, or irrelevant.

All these trends make life challenging for media outlets that are trying to keep their existing news consumers, while persuading at least some members of the un-audience to join their side. The problem lies both in the nature of news — with all its sadness, tragedy, and violence — and in how the news is packaged and presented. It’s both news and “the news” that repels non-consumers. And that has prompted many organizations to experiment with novel ways to attract the attention of that second group of news avoiders.

In November 2024, the Canadian Journalism Foundation sponsored a panel discussion called “Tactics for Combatting News Avoidance.” Among the suggestions to emerge from that session was a recommendation that outlets present more “explainers” to help people who find the news “impenetrable.” The CBC had already jumped on the explainer bandwagon two years earlier, with a slickly produced daily feature called About That, which runs on its streaming service, social media channels, and occasionally in a condensed version on The National. It’s hosted by hoodie-wearing Andrew Chang, one of the younger and hipper broadcasters in the CBC news stable.

Chang addresses one topic per episode, usually expressed in the form of a question: Can Canada survive Trump’s tariffs? How much is too much debt? The purpose, according to a CBC promotional blurb, is to find “the awesome in daily news by expanding our understanding of the stories everybody’s talking about.” A recent spot about China’s control of rare earth elements had racked up more than 209,000 views just thirteen hours after it was posted to YouTube.

“A lot of news makes assumptions of the audience,” Brodie Fenlon, the general manager and editor-in-chief of CBC News, tells me. “We assume you have been following the story forever. But this country is full of younger people and immigrants, and I think one of the reasons explainers are successful is because they start at the beginning and they don’t make you feel excluded or dumb about not knowing all of it.”

Fenlon and other newsroom leaders are acutely aware of the challenges posed by widespread news avoidance. In addition to explainers, they are trying to counter the negativity of news with more positive stories (the Globe and Mail now has beat reporters covering “happiness” and “healthy living”) and are tackling the feeling of hopelessness that so many news stories engender with “solutions journalism,” featuring people actively working to solve problems. What’s ironic is that all this breast-beating over news avoidance is happening at a moment when there has actually been a significant spike in audiences across all Canadian news platforms. Thank you, Donald Trump.

In early February, after the president had been making noises for months about imposing tariffs on Canada and turning us into the fifty-first state, the average daily views on the CBC News app grew by 120 percent over January’s figures. For many people, including me, these were stories that were too compelling to avoid.

On March 4, the CBC’s main TV channel and CBC News Network aired a special on the Canada-U.S. trade war. Some 2.4 million of us tuned in, making it the most watched prime-time program in Canada that day, an exceedingly rare milestone for a news program. And on election night in April, both CBC and CTV had record-setting radio, TV, and streaming numbers.

“We’re in a moment,” Fenlon concedes. “The stuff we’re dealing with in terms of politics, the U.S. administration, threats to Canada, tariffs — that’s stuff that people cannot not pay attention to.” He believes people will follow the news when their security, safety, and employment feel threatened. “If you had talked to me a year ago in a different administration when it didn’t feel that way — then we were having to work hard to get people to pay attention to stories that matter.”

While Trump may have helped slow the drift toward news avoidance in Canada, at least temporarily, his effect in his own country has been just the opposite. After he was first elected, in 2016, many American news outlets experienced a “Trump bump,” a major boost in cable news ratings and newspaper, magazine, and digital news subscriptions. Consumption stayed high throughout Trump’s first term, peaking in 2020 with the outbreak of COVID‑19 and a close presidential election, but it has been in decline ever since.

In 2023, engagement with stories related to the subsequent presidential race was down significantly compared with 2019, and TV ratings on election night in November 2024 were well below previous cycles. In 2016, 71.4 million Americans watched election-night coverage on TV. Those numbers fell to 56.9 million in 2020 and to 42.3 million in 2024.

Predictably, Trump 2.0 has been good for ratings at Fox News, but there’s been no “Trump bump” for the rest of the mainstream media this time around. Between election day and Trump’s second inauguration, daytime and prime-time ratings for Democratic-friendly channels MSNBC and CNN dropped precipitously. Polls showed that many Americans felt the need to dial down political news consumption. Ratings did rally a bit after the inauguration, as anti-Trumpers recovered from the shock of his election and turned their TVs back on, but the numbers are still down by double digits from the period before the election.

Admittedly, these numbers are not as important as they used to be. Falling ratings may well signal a rise in news avoidance, but they almost certainly reflect the rise in cord-cutting. There are simply far fewer households with cable subscriptions today than there were when Trump first appeared on the political stage. Even so, television remains an important source of news for many people, especially when major stories like elections, wars, and natural disasters are top of mind. But the real story behind news avoidance today is not to be found in TV ratings for news programming — or in the circulation stats of magazines and newspapers.

The rise of news avoidance is happening at a time when news is more omnipresent and available than ever before. People who tell pollsters that they don’t regularly consume news because “news will find me” if it’s important are not far wrong.

It is hard to measure actual news consumption when “news” is now everywhere. Take late-night TV, for example. Decades ago, Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, and David Letterman might have poked fun at the sexual indiscretions of Bill Clinton or the malapropisms of George W. Bush, but their monologues were not centred on politics, for fear of alienating viewers with differing political affiliations. But many of today’s late-night hosts unapologetically build their comedy around the news, with withering criticism of Trump. And both the White House and the networks have noticed. Want proof? Ask Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel.

Are their shows news programs? What about The Joe Rogan Experience, a podcast that regularly draws 15 million listeners across platforms such as Spotify and YouTube? Rogan, a former stand‑up comic, did a three-hour interview with Trump during the 2024 campaign that was widely seen as pivotal to increasing his support among younger voters, especially young men. Political influencers on TikTok and other social media enjoy numbers that mainstream media sites can only dream about. If you stretch the definition of news to mean anything that informs you about the world, then the problem of news avoidance basically goes away.

What comedy shows, podcasts, and social media videos are not — in almost all cases — are sources of journalism. In their classic The Elements of Journalism, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel wrote that “the discipline of verification is what separates journalism from entertainment, propaganda, fiction, or art.” And that verification process usually involves someone — maybe an editor, maybe a producer — asking a journalist one critical question: “How do you know this is true?”

That question is rarely asked of podcasters, influencers, and creators, though it is probably more important now than ever. The mechanisms of verification, established over the last century or so, have been far from perfect and have failed on multiple occasions, sometimes spectacularly (“weapons of mass destruction,” anyone?), but they generally lead to better results than the flood of misinformation that we now swim in. When entertainment, agitation, persuasion, and serving the algorithm are what you are about, verification can only get in the way.

Seen in that light, avoidance may be not the disease but rather the symptom. The malady we should be focusing on is the decoupling of news and journalism.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized I have actually been following these developments for a long time. One of my beats at The Sunday Edition on CBC Radio was the intersection of media and technology. In June 2009, for example, I produced two hour-long documentaries called “News 2.0: The Future of News in the Age of Social Media.”

This was at the dawn of Web 2.0, as it is called. Web 1.0 was all about search — about getting and reading data. It was a one-way street. Google was king. Sites were created by tech types with a secret language. Web 2.0 is the social web. It’s about reading, writing, creating, and interacting with others — mostly, at the beginning, on blogs, wikis, Facebook, and a new site called Twitter. The great A. J. Liebling once wrote that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Now everyone can own one.

I began to grasp the implications of the shift in the summer of 2008, when I attended the Couchiching Conference, a non-partisan forum organized by the Couchiching Institute of Public Affairs, held annually since 1932 on the shores of Lake Couchiching, north of Toronto. The theme of that year’s conference was “The Power of Knowledge: The New Global Currency,” and the opening night featured a rousing debate on the subject of the future of news. The combatants were an unusual pair: Paul Sullivan and Andrew Keen.

Sullivan, a former CBC Radio host and editor at the Globe and Mail and the Vancouver Sun, was as mainstream a journalist as you could find, yet he spoke in support of “citizen journalists” and against journalistic “gatekeepers,” a role that he once happily occupied. At the time, he was running a site called Orato.com (Latin for “I speak”), one of several “citizen journalism” sites that were popping up in the early days of Web 2.0, where unpaid “citizen journalists” could present their takes on just about anything without having to endure the hassle of dealing with an editor. (One of the largest and best funded was NowPublic.com, out of Vancouver, which Time had named one of the top fifty websites of 2007.)

“We don’t have to put up with some gatekeeper making decisions for us in a newsroom about what we can and cannot have access to,” Sullivan said in his opening statement. “We can find the news as it is happening, before it has been processed. We can have all the news that fits, and on the internet, that’s all the news. These days, anyone can crash the party, and these days, anyone does.”

Keen, a British-born Silicon Valley entrepreneur turned tech critic, wasn’t having any of that. He had just written The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, a scathing and best-selling critique of Web 2.0 generally and user-generated media specifically. “A citizen journalist is a contradiction in terms,” he declared. “A citizen is someone who votes, who is a participant in a political community. A journalist is someone who reports on the world and particularly reports on the world outside themselves.” Sullivan’s “definition of citizen journalist is someone who has an opinion,” Keen said. “He’s confusing the notion of having an opinion with knowing about the world and having verified fact-checked information that has been professionally aggregated.”

Sullivan argued that when it came to truth telling, there wasn’t much difference between his citizen journalists and the journalists employed by mainstream news outlets. “There are lots of fakes, lots of frauds, lots of spammers, lots of scammers, lots of propagandists, lunatics, and hoaxes on the internet,” he maintained. “Many of them are professional journalists.”

Over the next couple of years, I attended several tech conferences in Canada and the U.S. where I met others who were celebrating the opportunity that Web 2.0 offered them to be their own reporter, editor, fact-checker, and publisher. “You know, ‘professional’ just means you get paid to do it; it doesn’t mean you have any special magic juice,” one of them told me in Toronto. “Yeah, you spend a lot of time doing it, but so do I, so I think I can make some judgment calls for myself.”

When I asked these latter-day Walter Cronkites about the discipline of verification, they assured me that the self-correcting mechanism of the web would filter out the bad stuff. If someone posted something that wasn’t true, the “community” would quickly respond to correct the error. News 2.0 would be quicker, more transparent, and more accountable than News 1.0. It could also be more accurate. With the credibility of mainstream media at a low ebb, following so many self-inflicted wounds, these people were legitimately asking, “How much worse could journalism powered by amateurs be?”

In many ways, the democratization of the news was something to celebrate. It would now include, in the words of the New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, “the people formerly known as the audience.” As a radio documentarian at the CBC, I was the beneficiary of a world run by gatekeepers, where my voice was heard because I was on the right side of the gate. Otherwise, my ability to reach a wider audience would have been limited to how many audio cassettes I could mail out. Web 2.0 would provide an unfiltered space for anyone with an opinion about what was “really happening”— not just the rare someone with institutional backing.

The optimism that fuelled these early adopters of the social web has proven to be unfounded, however. There are way too many bad actors — too many with their own agendas, too many who are indifferent to the consequences of what they are posting — for the good actors to offset. The social web has become a toxic swamp, and the promise of citizen journalism has faded. Indeed, citizens have discovered how difficult reporting actually is — and how expensive real newsgathering can be if the gatherers expect to be paid for their labour.

What remains from that period is a deep distrust of “gatekeepers”— and the products they produce. In Canada, only 39 percent of respondents in the latest Reuters digital news survey agreed that “most news most of the time” can be trusted. In the U.S., just 30 percent did. In both countries, many hold the rather perverse idea that verification, fact-checking, independence, and other core tenets of traditional journalism result in news that is more prone to bias and distortion and less credible than that provided by people untethered from any of those values. Given that trust is lowest among younger respondents, this is a problem that won’t be fixed anytime soon.

“People seem to be less and less tolerant of anything that challenges what they believe,” the CBC’s Fenlon says. “They’re consuming a lot of content on social platforms that are feeding them their own perspectives and outrage and anger and all the emotional stuff.” They also have little patience for journalism that strives to be impartial and balanced. “I’ve seen an unusual amount of rejection of that approach,” he continues. “I’m hearing things such as ‘How could you platform that perspective? How dare you bring that person on? How could you ask that question of this politician? Are you trying to tank that politician?’ ”

But Fenlon has also noticed a paradox when it comes to Canadian attitudes toward the news. “When you survey people and ask them if they value impartiality and unbiased journalism, it’s right up there as the thing they value most. So there’s a conflict between what people say they want and how they act.”

The challenge for Fenlon and others running mainstream newsrooms is bridging that gap between news consumers’ values and what news producers deliver. They have to convince skeptical audiences that they are the only type of news that strives for accuracy and impartiality. What was once an unstated and widely held assumption must now be proven.

Last spring, the BBC took a bold step in that direction when it announced the launch of BBC Verify, backed by a team of roughly sixty journalists whose full-time mandate is to fact-check reporting, substantiate video, and analyze data to counter disinformation. In the interests of transparency, all their work is in the open, available for audiences to examine. “ ‘If you know how it’s made, you can trust what it says’— that’s what our audiences have told us,” said Deborah Turness, then the BBC News chief executive officer, in announcing the project. “Trust is earned and transparency will help us earn it.”

BBC Verify is among the worthwhile initiatives that could ultimately convince some journalism avoiders that relying on creator- and influencer-driven content on social platforms isn’t their only option. But those same platforms are owned by some of the biggest and most powerful companies in the world, and they’re determined to keep their share of eyeballs.

In 2016, I produced a one-hour radio documentary about Facebook. Back then, Mark Zuckerberg was still claiming his platform’s goal was to “give everyone in the world the best personalized newspaper we can.” The core of that personalized paper was the News Feed (since renamed Feed), with a constantly updated list of stories that appeared in the middle of your profile page. It consisted of content provided by your friends, as well as content from publishers and consumer brands, all selected by an algorithm safely sealed inside an impenetrable black box.

Trying to figure out what content would please the algorithm became a major preoccupation for publishers, who were discovering, to their great dismay, that with friends like Facebook, they didn’t need to look for enemies. Their articles were being read by many more people, but Facebook was drawing traffic away from their websites, and the bulk of the ad revenues were now flowing to it. The mainstream media’s old business model was collapsing. Hundreds of newspapers folded. Iconic newsmagazines like Time, Newsweek, and Maclean’s faded into irrelevance. Reporting ranks were decimated by massive layoffs, and audiences balked at paying for a subpar product that, in most cases, was a pale shadow of its former self.

Some publishers, including the New York Times and the Globe and Mail, were able to strike deals with Facebook to slightly improve the terms of engagement, but the core of the problem was neatly summarized by the Canadian tech writer Cory Doctorow. “In the long term, Facebook’s idea here is to obviate the New York Times. It’s not to support the New York Times,” Doctorow explained when I interviewed him back then. “Their goal is to reduce the need to ever leave Facebook. And the New York Times is a commodity supplier of news to Facebook that they can use to retain users for longer, and they are not in any way interested in the long-term health of the New York Times.”

Ten years later, Doctorow’s warning to publications about hitching their wagon to Facebook has proven to be prescient. Social media has not obviated the Gray Lady or a handful of other elite legacy outlets, but it has contributed mightily to the destruction of many others and to the decimation of local coverage.

After years of courting publishers by touting the advantages of distributing content through its platform, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, decided that being a source of news and political content was more trouble than it was worth. News didn’t promote user engagement as effectively as other content, and there were controversies over content moderation, censorship, and misinformation. It turns out that Zuckerberg’s “best personalized newspaper” was not really interested in providing users with news, at least not the kind produced by journalists.

And so Facebook simply decided to get out of the news distribution business, with devastating consequences for publications that relied on the platform for referrals. One study of nearly 2,000 news and media websites conducted by the research firm Chartbeat found that their referrals from Facebook, as measured by page views, fell from 50 percent of overall traffic in 2022 to 33 percent in 2023. From its peak nine years ago, the non-profit publication Mother Jones has seen a 99 percent drop in referrals.

For Canadian news sites, the number of referrals plunged to zero following Meta’s decision in August 2023 to end news availability on Facebook and Instagram altogether. Before the ban, Facebook pages generated between five and eight million views of Canadian content per day. The ban, which applies to publishers irrespective of origin, was ostensibly imposed to protest Ottawa’s Online News Act, which would have required large “digital news intermediaries” to enter into negotiations with those outlets to compensate them for posting material on their platforms. Meta, claiming that the act was based on a “fundamentally flawed premise,” simply chose not to negotiate. And while the company’s opposition to the act was likely sincere, the decision to get out of the news distribution business, at least in Canada, aligned nicely with the direction it had been moving in anyway.

“This has been a decade-long weaning off of journalism intentionally by social media platforms, and a move away from circulating links and content and individuals affiliated with traditional journalism,” Taylor Owen, the director of McGill University’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy and a principal investigator at the Media Ecosystem Observatory, told me recently. The platforms shifted their algorithms away from users’ individual preferences to more centralized models, so that we are all basically seeing the same content from the same limited number of sources, largely excluding legacy media. The result: “We’ve been acculturated to trusting non-official sources.”

The consequence of these algorithmic shifts is that even if we go looking for journalism on social media platforms that still claim to be distributing news links, we have a hard time finding it. That’s why Owen believes that any discussion of what’s behind the sharp rise in news avoidance should not centre strictly on the choices that individuals make. “Avoidance implies choice,” he says, “and I’m not sure there’s a lot of choice here. It’s being enforced on us in large part by the design of the platforms.”

Even after Meta stopped distributing journalistic content, millions of people have continued to turn to it for news. A survey conducted by the Media Ecosystem Observatory six months after the ban went into effect found 33 percent of Canadians were still using Facebook or Instagram as a source of information about politics and current events several times a month. The survey also revealed that most of those people weren’t even aware that news sites could no longer be accessed through the platform.

Canadian Facebook users can no longer reach legacy media, but they can get “news” from hyperpartisan sites like Canada Proud, a right-wing site with more than 600,000 followers. In the run‑up to this spring’s federal election, the site was averaging nearly 200,000 engagements a day. Some of them came through the ads that ran on the site. One highlighted a photograph that appeared to show Mark Carney at a garden party with the notorious Jeffrey Epstein enabler Ghislaine Maxwell. It accused Carney of “hanging out with sex traffickers.”

When journalism’s away, the purveyors of conspiracy theories, fake news, disinformation, and division will play. And there’s not much stopping them. “We’ve spent almost twenty years now as a society expecting and normalizing social media as the way we get everything,” Owen explains. “We used to be able to get everything on it, but now we get most things except for journalism.”

I don’t want an algorithm telling me what news I might find interesting. I like being surprised by stories I thought I would never care about. That’s why I regularly visit the websites of news sources that I trust and read articles that I see there. As we’ve established, though, I’m a bit of a dinosaur.

One thing I don’t do is turn to TikTok, but for millions of people, the app has become a major news source. Last year, a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center found that 17 percent of adults use it to stay informed about current affairs. Among adults under thirty, that number grows to 43 percent. And although all major news organizations have accounts on TikTok, the survey found that fewer than 1 percent of all TikTok accounts followed by Americans belong to traditional media outlets.

Yes, you can find real journalism on TikTok. Rachel Gilmore, a reporter who was laid off in a Global News downsizing, has taken her skills to the platform and has attracted more than 201,000 followers. But most people who post news on the platform have no background in journalism. The real stars of TikTok news are not journalists but “news influencers,” defined by the Pew Research Center as people who post regularly about news and current issues and have at least 100,000 followers on social media platforms.

A Pew survey of more than 10,000 American adults released in November 2024 found that 21 percent of those surveyed said they regularly got news from news influencers, including 37 percent of those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine but just 7 percent of those of us over sixty-five.

The importance of news influencers within the news ecosystem is growing rapidly in the second Trump administration. They’re occupying some of the highly coveted seats in the White House daily press briefing, and prominent politicians are sitting down for interviews with them. When the U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi, wanted to release a binder full of files relating to Jeffrey Epstein, for example, she invited fifteen right-wing influencers to receive it.

In Canada, one of the most popular news influencers is Frank Cirinna, a thirty-year-old high school teacher near Toronto, who posts on TikTok as frankdomenic. His short videos commenting on Canadian politics and other news stories have attracted more than 136,000 followers. Cirinna insists he’s not a journalist. “We shouldn’t be picking up the slack for the journalistic outlets that don’t deem it important to properly support their staff,” he told a CBC.ca reporter. But during the last federal election, he was invited to appear on CBC News Network to discuss various issues. That job was previously filled by actual reporters who were out in the field talking to people.

To get a sense of TikTok news, I watched dozens of videos from one of the leading American news influencers, Aaron Parnas. A twenty-six-year-old lawyer, Parnas has more than 4.4 million followers on TikTok, another three million across other platforms, and a Substack newsletter that has more subscriptions than any other in the news category. He boasts that his burgeoning online media empire is “going to start competing with the big guys” and that “we are going to change the way media works in this country.”

Parnas seems like a smart, hard-working, and likeable young man. He’s incredibly prolific, sometimes posting as many as twenty-four TikToks a day. They are often shot while he’s walking down the street and start with him saying something like “We have big news for you this morning.” He then recaps a story that he has seen on TV or picked up from X or Truth Social or other online sources that he monitors diligently. Like most news influencers, Parnas relies heavily on reporting from mainstream media outlets, which raises this question: If the “big guys” continue to shed reporters, where will the disruptive mavericks get their “big news” from?

Parnas is a former Trumper turned Democrat, and he often puts an anti-Trump spin on his stories, not unlike CNN or MSNBC. He presents what he calls “the Gen Z perspective on all the issues in the news.” He also considers himself a journalist who presents accurate, timely, and unbiased news. Unlike Cirinna and most other news influencers, Parnas wants his work to be measured by traditional standards.

In many ways, news influencers are simply the latest iteration of the citizen journalists of the 2000s. Like Paul Sullivan, Parnas believes that news on platforms like TikTok is no more prone to error than news on CNN, and he believes that misinformation can be exposed through crowdsourced fact-checking. But there’s no reason to think that is any more true today than it was twenty years ago.

One important difference between today’s news influencers and yesterday’s citizen journalists is that there’s now a viable business model to support the work at least some of them are doing. Popular influencers with accounts on Substack, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram can make a very decent living through subscriptions, crowdfunding, public events, and, in some cases, selling merch.

It’s easy to see why people, especially younger ones with short attention spans and only a marginal interest in the news of the day, would be attracted to Parnas and his ilk. “Who needs CNN when you have Aaron?” gushed a fan on TikTok. “I stopped getting news from anywhere but Aaron.” Another twenty-four-year-old Parnas fan told The Atlantic, “You’re getting less propagandized. It’s not pushing an agenda.”

Young people aren’t the only ones following news influencers on TikTok, of course. The Pew Research Center also found that about one in four people with lower incomes are more likely to get news from them. Compare that with 21 percent of middle-income people and 16 percent of those with higher incomes. And women are more likely than men to get their news from the platform (24 percent versus 15 percent).

Young people, women, lower-income people: these are the three groups that Stephanie Edgerly and other researchers have identified as being most likely to be news avoiders. They are the un-audience. Is it possible that social media, especially TikTok, is the solution to the problem of news avoidance? If it comes down to a choice between getting news from Aaron Parnas or avoiding it entirely, the non-professionals are clearly a better choice.

But what about old-school news junkies like me and the late Edward McCann? Where will we go to experience the “joy” of staying informed about the latest news from around the world?

For me, much of that joy has returned, despite the awfulness of so much that is reported these days. There are just too many interesting things happening in the world for me to look away and join the ranks of the news avoiders. I’m grateful for the experience, though. It taught me that the occasional detox is a healthy thing to do. There’s no need to feel guilty about it.

I’m also less worried about those surveys that show news avoidance rates as high as 40 percent. I’m not even sure I actually believe those numbers. (Yes, I appreciate the irony here.) Some form of “news” is everywhere. It is inescapable. It permeates popular culture. It is ubiquitous online. Total avoidance would require finding a good-sized rock to hide under.

What does worry me — and has done since I started looking into the future of news in the age of social media twenty years ago — is the future of journalism. In those early days, I was focused on the collapse of the mainstream media’s traditional business model, as advertisers deserted print and flocked to the web and as publishers struggled to find a way to monetize their content. That remains a huge concern, as evidenced by the relentless shrinking of newsrooms everywhere, the closing of bureaus, the loss of jobs, and the death of once prosperous newspapers and magazines.

But ultimately what I find most troubling is that decoupling of news and journalism. It began with the arrival of Web 2.0, and it has now become deeply entrenched. How can journalism survive in a time when fewer and fewer people seem to place very much value on it? When “news” can still thrive in its absence? Journalism avoidance, not news avoidance, is what we should be worried about.

Journalism is hard. It’s time-consuming. It’s expensive. Sometimes it’s even dangerous. And it’s not a solitary enterprise. There may be good journalists on TikTok and other social media platforms. There are some very good journalists writing on Substack. But what they are providing is mostly opinion and analysis. There’s not much reporting. Reporting requires someone asking that critical question: “How do you know this is true?” It can require lawyers to keep you out of trouble, and it is especially hard to do if you’re worried about pleasing an algorithm or growing your subscription base above all else.

Jessica Yellin, CNN’s former chief White House correspondent, now a popular Substacker and podcaster, would likely disagree with me. Writing in The Atlantic, she has argued that reporting is not dead on social media platforms at all. She insists that there are thousands of “evidence-based creators” doing the hard work of seeking truth. In her view, we are “in the awkward adolescence of a media revolution.” Central to that revolution will be the adoption of journalistic values on social media through, among other things, some kind of certification for creators who use trusted sources, fact-check their content, and are transparent about sponsorship.

I do hope she’s right. Things are changing quickly. I’m not sure how much longer that newspaper coming to my door every morning will be around. If there’s going to be a maturing media revolution, I want it to be in the direction of more journalism and less seat-of-the-pants pontificating.

Spoken like a true dinosaur.

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Editor’s note: The printed edition’s table of contents inaccurately described the author of this piece as a “documentary filmmaker.” The magazine regrets the error.