Lack of relevance is the kiss of death for journalism

It was a phrase that rolled too easily off the tongue, as if it was the product of a branding exercise by smart young marketers. Nonetheless, it contained an imperative that should sit at the core of journalism.

The phrase had been around for a long time. It was the title of a column in U.S. News & World Report in the 1950s. Later it would capture what passed for imagination in the minds of media management executives, and become so ubiquitous that it virtually lost meaning.

What was the phrase? It was “news you can use”.

It needs to be resurrected, not as a trite play for audience but as the central element of how journalism will be practiced and how news will be presented.

Why, and why now?

It is a vital reset necessary to reverse one of the major factors contributing to growing news avoidance in many democracies. Study after study is mapping people who do not believe that the news – as presented – has relevance to them.

Irrelevance was highlighted in Oxford University’s Reuters Institute Trust in News Project and in the 2024 book, Avoiding the News by Toff, Palmer and Nielsen. Those findings were reflected in focus group comments in Auckland University of Technology’s 2025 JMAD report on trust. It is what RNZ’s Tim Watkin, in his book How to Rebuild Trust in Journalism (review posted on The Knightly Views last week) describes as the difference between lived reality and news reality.

Now the Pew Center in the United States has found that almost half the participants in a survey on Americans’ relationships with news believe that most of the news they come across is not relevant to their lives. A staggering 86 per cent believe news plays little or no part in making decisions in their daily lives and a similar number say it plays little or no part in making their own communities better.

The Pew Center findings are relevant to New Zealand because, according to the 2025 JMAD report, the level of trust in news here equates with that in the United States. The local survey does not, however, interrogate news relevance to the same degree as its offshore counterparts. Nonetheless, we should be able to assume some rough correlation with the latest US figures on that score too.

In 2024 Toff and his colleagues found that lack of relevance was one of three principal factors in news avoidance. The others were information overload, and anxiety caused by a preponderance of negative news. Low reserves of time and emotional energy, when combined with lack of relevance, make the cost of engaging with the news too high.

All three factors also figure in the latest Pew Center research. More than half of Americans say they are worn out by the news. JMAD puts the number lower here (a third) but the survey criteria differ and I suspect a direct comparison would push our number higher.

Whatever the numbers, it is obvious that the relevance of today’s news has been found wanting and needs to change if news media are to have a future. If they fix the relevance problem, both overload and anxiety will subside. News selection will become more positive through a refocussing of news values, and audiences will be drawn to reset sources through a new sense of utility.

Pick up any of our daily newspapers and, with rare exceptions, you will find pervasive negativity. Over the past five years our five metropolitan papers have carried more than 1400 lead stories about crime or serious injury. Television bulletins carry swathes of foreign news on conflict and tragedy – because the material is readily available and has visual impact. Yes, if it bleeds, it leads. Yet such stories are anxiety inducing and may needlessly proscribe the activities of ordinary people going about their daily lives. They generate online clicks now, but I venture to suggest that over time they will have the opposite effect. All of the research points to a rising portion of the population turning away from such material.

Some people feel the news is irrelevant because they believe media regard them as irrelevant. In other words, marginalised communities become more marginalised because they are ignored or stereotyped.

So we need news we can use, but we need to very clear what that means…and what it does not.

It is not an algorithmic device to manipulate an unknowing audience, an invitation to go to even greater lengths to push the emotional buttons. It is not a phrase to be trotted out to give media managers the erroneous feeling they are doing something right. It is not the cynical exploitation of consumer needs to attract advertisers.

It is a measure to reintroduce the word ‘importance’ to the news values lexicon. That word has been displaced by ‘interesting’ in many newsrooms. And ‘interesting’ is often a judgement based on the ‘performance’ analytics of similar stories published online – if it ‘performed’ last time, it will do so again. Utility requires an altogether more complex and more human assessment. Those complexities are the very reason you will not find a poster on newsroom walls listing the criteria to be applied to stories. News values are merits drawn from shared knowledge and experience, influenced by past and contemporaneous events, and overlaid by the almost infinite characteristics of our anthropology. Utility lies at their core.

It does require news selection to be based less on ease of access. Crime stories appear regularly because Police and the courts are regular, relatively predictable sources of material that has emotional ‘pull’. Coverage of both institutions is vital in terms of accountability and open justice but how often do editors see the number of such stories as too many? Not often enough.

It does require less formulaic reporting. The way stories are framed can exclude as easily as include. For example, the conflict framing of politics – boxing matches – pre-ordains much of the approach to that coverage and it can be at the expense of spelling out public impacts and implications. Emotional framing is too often at the expense of relevance.

It does require newsrooms to assume a role as educators. This may sound like a septuagenarian’s attempt to take the world back to John Reith’s concept of the BBC as morally and intellectually uplifting as well as entertaining. However, it does not require moralistic paternalism to tell the public that it needs to know something it may not necessarily want to know.

It does require changes to the way some stories are reported. Relevance needs to be spelled out – why it is important. Those elements of a story that have impact on the audience need to be prioritised, not treated as secondary or tertiary considerations.

It does mean understanding the audience as people, not as analytical data. Numbers are important, but not at the expense of marginalising parts of the current or potential audience. Our small media pool carries a responsibility to meet the needs of society at large. At the very least, it must not give a section of that society the impression that it has been marginalised, misrepresented, or simply forgotten.

And it does mean ensuring that the makeup of our newsrooms reflect the makeup of the communities within which they gather and distribute the news. Look at my review of Watkin’s book and you will see what I mean.

Journalists have not set out deliberately to make their work less relevant to the public. Various factors such as the apparent demands of a digital audience (more likely the demands of the undisclosed algorithms driving platform traffic), shrinking newsrooms, and the globalisation of information have each played a part in shifting the nature of news. Sadly, the survey data on news avoidance is evidence that the shift has not been for the better.

A reset will require soul-searching and critical analysis of how and why our newsrooms do what they do. They can, however, look to examples where relevance is not in doubt.

Some…and I mean only some… of our local media have undoubted relevance for the communities they serve. I live in a local news desert that has no community news outlet at all. So, out of a perverse and somewhat masochistic desire to see what I’m missing, I follow a few publications a little further afield.

In Auckland, the North Shore’s Devonport Flagstaff and Howick-Pakuranga’s Eastern Times are fortnightly community newspapers that keep residents regularly updated on matters as diverse as botched traffic management, the state of local sewage and stormwater, who is running the new school, why the local dairy owner is selling up, and what the local MP and local government representatives say they have been doing for the community. The achievements of local school pupils and volunteers are recognised and upcoming events laid out. There is picture after picture of locals who you might know. And there are pages and pages of service advertisement. Need a plumber or floor sander? The bottom line is that these publications are useful. They have utility. They are relevant.

Incidentally, they also show that local news can be sustainable. They may not look like the community newspapers of old – they are A4 size rather than tabloid – but the Eastern Times runs to 72 pages and the Flagstaff around 40 to 56 pages. Both carry levels of advertising that show they are valued by their communities.

Newsroom shrinkage has seen a retreat from local reporting at scale by our major groups. Too often now they seek stories that can be run across a series of titles. If not more bang for their buck, it stretched the dollar a little further. Too often, however, it is at the expense of direct relevance.

It would be wishful thinking to suggest that our mainstream media return to the days of coverage at a very local level. However, all can take lessons from community level outlets on the meaning of relevance.

New Zealand would be a better place if our journalists spent more time asking “What does this mean for readers/viewers/listeners?” than extracting the last bit of emotion from the family of a road accident victim who died three years ago.

Disclosure: Image created by AI (ChatGPT)