Tag: news avoidance

Every silver lining has a cloud: This one is news avoidance

An increase in public trust in news announced last week has obscured a much less welcome statistic: More New Zealanders are actively avoiding reports of what is happening around them.

The 2026 JMAD Trust in News Report from AUT shows the number of people who sometimes avoid the news has risen to 46 per cent – up five percentage points on last year. The number who occasionally avoid (a higher frequency than ‘sometimes’) is up two percentage points to 19 per cent. Those who often avoid the news has dropped two points to 13 per cent.

Cumulatively, that means that more than three-quarters of us feel the need to switch off at some point. Why? More than half said it was because the news negatively affected their mood and more than a third were” worn out” by the news.

News is now an avalanche that never stops. The old circadian rhythm of morning newspapers, evening television news, and hourly radio bulletins in between has been destroyed by a galaxy of online 24/7 news sources and intrusive smartphone notifications. Updates have turned coherent stories into confusing textbites.

This avalanche may be why a quarter of those surveyed felt there was nothing they could do with the information they received and 17 per cent questioned its relevance to their lives. Forty per cent felt there was too much coverage of conflict or politics and, given the adversarial approach our journalists take to political coverage, it’s probably difficult to distinguish between the two. Continue reading “Every silver lining has a cloud: This one is news avoidance” →

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? Continue reading “Lack of relevance is the kiss of death for journalism” →

Issues of avoidance: Bomb threats…or news in general

 

Our news media had a tough call to make over the weekend on whether or not to report a bomb threat. Did they get it right?

The incident in question related to a trans-Tasman Air New Zealand flight from Wellington that was held on the tarmac at Sydney Airport for an hour over what a passenger described as “a bomb threat”.

Radio New Zealand reported the incident as a bomb threat (after Australian media first did so) and the RNZ report was reproduced by other New Zealand media including NZME, Stuff, and TVNZ. OneNews carried a report on its 6pm bulletin that made no mention of bomb threats but the TVNZ website continued to run with the RNZ story.

The RNZ story quoted a passenger on the flight, who said that the pilot had reported “a slight problem” but 10 minutes later another passenger showed her a news report saying there was a bomb threat. The passenger went on to state the reaction of passengers and offered a theory on the threat: “There may have been a note on the plane – that is what caused this – so we all sort of gathered the note had been picked up on the plane.”

For its part, Air New Zealand simply issued a statement saying it was aware of “a security incident” on the flight and that “standard security protocols” were followed.

There was a delay of about an hour in disembarking and processing the passengers, and the return flight was cancelled. However, the operations of the airport do not appear to have been otherwise affected.

The question is: Should the incident have been reported as a bomb threat? Continue reading “Issues of avoidance: Bomb threats…or news in general” →

I have news for you, Sunshine: It’s not all bad

Last week I was lying in my sickbed recovering from a painful allergic reaction and, as you do, I let my mind wander. It began to ponder a question that has preoccupied me ever since: Why is there so little good news?

It seems the world is filled with the bad and the ugly and precious little of the good stuff. At least that is the impression I get from my daily diet of news.

I looked back over the lead stories of New Zealand’s five metropolitan dailies for the past month. Of the 130 stories I counted, 98 had a negative tone. Only 16 were positive and the remainder were neither one thing nor the other.

I have been tracking these newspapers’ lead stories since 2020 and there is an almost unrelenting sense of gloom, and sometimes doom, although I admit the Covid pandemic accounted for some of that negativity. It did a couple of years ago, but not now.

My introduction to the day’s news yesterday via the country’s news websites was a smorgasbord of gloom and copycat gloom at that – the same topics repeated across outlets. It didn’t improve into the afternoon when there was blanket coverage of the return of the three strikes law for repeat offenders.

Mind you, our overseas counterparts weren’t any better. The Sydney Morning Herald gave me “Eighteen minutes of terror” as it retraced the movements of the Bondi Junction mall killer. The New York Times pondered the “mountain of evidence” against Donald Trump. The Wall Street Journal took me inside the “White House scramble” to avert a Middle East War. The Daily Mail said Tories were accusing Labour of “appearing to hate Britain” and the BBC and Deutsche Welle both told me Netanyahu vowed to reject sanctions against an army unit for human rights violations. Only The Guardian had a glimmer of good news over military aid for Ukraine (good news, that is, if you’re not Russian).

Why are journalists so drawn to bad news? Continue reading “I have news for you, Sunshine: It’s not all bad” →