We wake up to notifications before our eyes focus and feet hit the floor. We move between work pings, group chats, weather alerts, school emails and endless scrolls. We’re parents; some of us are caregiving for young children, others for aging parents, or both. We’re juggling school schedules with soccer practice, work schedules with friendships, walking the dog, cooking dinner, going to the gym.
Even journalists, whose job it is to both inform and be informed, are on news diets. Still, few of us wake up trying to avoid democracy, but we do wake up drawing firmer boundaries around technology and how much we’ll be informed as we try to survive any given Tuesday without feeling constantly interrupted.
Digital wellness has become part of how many people think about work, relationships, parenting and mental health.
While digital wellness isn’t a journalism term, the concept may be pushing journalism to rediscover what it has always been for. Local media of any kind, commercial or nonprofit, cannot fulfill their public service mission simply by producing more news and distributing more information, because people are actively changing their relationship with technology and information to fit their lived needs. Instead, we must consider what — or how — local news would be if its goal were to help people become sufficiently informed, not maximally engaged.
People dip in and out of the news cycle. Many have a regular digital hygiene routine and curate their feeds based on their own life seasons. They sample products and cancel, unsubscribe or unfollow out of habit. They listen secondhand, follow creators, skim headlines. They pause. They get interrupted or self-distracted. They return. There is no Sunday morning reading habit, any more than there’s a 5:00 broadcast before family dinner.
These behaviors don’t necessarily describe a population abandoning news. They describe people actively managing their relationship with it. So, maybe we ought to be asking what helps people embrace the news, rather than why they avoid it?
News avoidance and fatigue are more complicated than they sound
Recent API research complicates the idea that even journalism’s most committed consumers simply want more news. A third of people who pay for or donate to news and information say they are trying to create boundaries around their phone and online time, compared with 21% of those who do not pay or donate. Payers and donors are also more likely to say their news gives them a hopeful view of the world. The challenge may not be persuading people to consume more, but creating news experiences that feel valuable enough to support — and healthy enough to live with.
If you step back and look at Americans more broadly, you see similar indicators. Those who describe themselves as avoiding news or following a strict news diet may not be uninformed; they may be simply avoiding certain formats or emotional experiences. Maybe they’re avoiding particular habits or institutions. But they are still hearing about what’s happening — through friends and family, creators and podcasts, community organizations and even indirect exposure. As CJR’s recent piece posits: Many news avoiders are really “secondhand news” consumers.
Likewise, University of Minnesota professor and director of the Minnesota Journalism Center Ben Toff’s research on news avoidance has found that it’s not simply content quality that’s being avoided. Boundaries around information and our time, mental load and emotional well-being are also defined by how news feels: whether it’s understandable or connected to lived experience or whether we believe we can do anything about what’s been reported.
So what then are news avoiders actually avoiding in the journalism and information experiences we’ve built? And how do we intentionally address this now? And perhaps just as importantly: What kinds of news experiences do people willingly return to, recommend or build their habits around?
Many newsrooms are already designing for everyday relevance
Fortunately, many established and emerging local news organizations are already experimenting with ways to make local news an institution people can live with — not one they have to recover from. These experiments may look different, but they flow from a common instinct: to help local news remain indispensable.
And many of these efforts aren’t replacing newspapers or daily broadcasts; they’re extending the ways trusted local institutions show up in people’s everyday lives.
They’re adapting products, services and community experiences that reduce the cost of keeping up with local news, increase delight, create human connection and intentionally move journalism either offline or into more intentional and protected online spaces by:
- Designing for human connection:
- Helping people experience journalism together: The Tampa Bay Times hosts article clubs, while Radio Ambulante convenes listening clubs to invite community members into collective sense-making.
- Building relationships beyond the story: Boston Globe’s B-side brings subscribers together for dinners, and Kansas Publishing Ventures hosts recurring social hours that strengthen community among readers.
- Seeing the stories in your lived environment: Future Tides and El Timpano invite residents to explore and learn together through guided tours, bioblitzes and place-based experiences.
- Creating physical places for civic connection: Islandport Media owns a community cafe while Community News Brief created a neighborhood storefront, making journalism part of everyday community life.
- Inviting people to solve problems alongside journalists: Block Club Chicago and Documented have created opportunities for residents to volunteer their time, knowledge and lived experience to community problem-solving.
- Designing for presence in everyday life:
- Using the physical world to extend journalism’s reach: Baltimore Beat’s Beat Boxes and County 10’s QR code experiments bring local journalism into neighborhoods and everyday routines rather than waiting for audiences to come online.
- Using print as a strategic experience, not just a product: Pittsburgh’s Public Source and AZ Luminaria have embraced zines while The Virginian-Pilot and Verite News have found strategic use of print through fliers and postcards can slow horse race coverage of local elections.
- Encouraging creativity instead of passive consumption: J. The Jewish News has repurposed old newspapers through scrapbooking and collage workshops, and Newsberg’s The Logoff event transformed disconnecting from the internet into a shared experience.
- Designing for healthier digital relationships:
- Designing digital products that respect people’s time: The Philadelphia Inquirer has experimented with tools like its Happiness Map, helping readers engage intentionally rather than endlessly.
- Making communication more personal and useful: Pigeon605 lets readers choose the text alerts they want, while Conecta Arizona uses WhatsApp cafecitos to connect residents with experts in trusted conversation.
- Sending newsletters because they’re relevant: The Times Union “Now” newsletter is organized around usefulness and relevance rather than routine, and Chattanooga Times Free Press welcomes new residents through a short-run newsletter.
The field is responding to a trend not yet named
At first blush, these tactics, projects and behaviors may seem unrelated. Some happen offline, others through text messages and email newsletters. But together, they point toward local news organizations moving beyond the production of news and toward the experience of being informed.
News leaders who say they want their journalism to help people make decisions and thrive must help their community maintain a sustainable relationship with civic information, which is very different from a newsroom that aims to get people to consume more information.
If this is true, then we might use these guiding principles in our work:
- We respect people’s attention
- We design for offline life
- We build belonging and agency
- We invest in joy and play, not as a feature but a core value
- We embed newsroom wellness into journalistic practice
Local journalists and news institutions can embrace their own humanness in response to contemporary and overlapping failures:
- The social feed is failing as a relationship environment. While 53% of content creators report greater difficulty reaching their fans in Patreon’s State of Create 2025 report, 57% of users’ time on TikTok is spent with accounts they don’t follow. Add to this that AI slop is making trusted relationships more valuable.
- People want more agency over what reaches them, when and how. As New_Public has imagined: there’s a near future where we ask an AI agent what we need to know, drawing from many sources, tailored to our circumstances and preferred format. If the feed is no longer the primary interface for people’s information, what then is our value as local news providers when our readers no longer need to visit our products to get the information they need?
- Human connection, creative expression, play and belonging are becoming even scarcer and therefore even more valuable. While we’ve been in the business of information, the steady shift away from an attention economy and toward a trust economy suggests that relationship infrastructure is our new value proposition.
The competition for attention is far broader than TikTok. It’s all of life. And none of us scale up to take in more, so we have to make a choice. Not between newspapers or TV. Not between news or social media. But between news or everything else that makes life meaningful.
As information becomes increasingly abundant and automated, trusted local institutions become even more important differentiators.
Why we’re convening this summit
Perhaps the antidote to news avoidance isn’t more kinds of news consumption. Perhaps it’s this idea of news embrace — a relationship in which people willingly make room for local journalism because it consistently helps them navigate their lives, connect with others and understand the places they call home.
This fall, the American Press Institute will convene news leaders, researchers and experts from fields outside journalism, such as applied neuroscience, positive psychology and consumer technology, to explore this question and consider ways to strengthen local news for a post-feed internet. An internet in which information is abundant and automated, while trusted human relationships, shared experiences and community connection are of highest value.
The future of local news is not without challenges or crises, yet it’s also bright and extends well beyond ensuring critical reporting continues. In our tech and AI-laden world, the future of local news will be shaped by the kinds of relationships we help people build with information, with one another and with the communities they call home. This is the conversation we’ll begin in Boise: how we might, or already are, strengthening a community’s trusted information routines and lifelong relationships with local news.
Let us know if you are working on these themes, central to our API Local News Summit on News Avoidance and Digital Wellness, taking place October 6-7 in Boise, Idaho. It’s our last summit of this year’s series and a pivotal topic for all local media today. events@pressinstitute.org
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