Switched off Newsrooms change tack to attract the 'avoiders'

When Deborah Turness, the chief executive of BBC News, informed her staff recently that she was shaking up how they worked in a drive to combat "the growing trend of news avoidance", she had in mind the likes of Dave Ayres, a handyman from Leeds.

- Michael Savage

"I used to have the news on the TV every morning for an hour or so as I got the children ready for school and completed my household tasks," he said. "Now it has literally been switched off and unplugged. I can't cope with it any more. It's just too much and there's nothing I can do about it."

He is not alone. The Guardian has been contacted by a series of former news junkies who are now seeking to restrict their news intake after suffering from disturbed sleep or a downturn in their mood.

Across newsrooms around the world, strategies are being launched to reach news avoiders, a cohort of refusniks behind a long-term decline in news engagement. The proportion of people who say they selectively avoid the news to some degree increased three percentage points last year to 39%, according to a survey across 17 countries by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Since 2017, the figure has increased by 10 percentage points. Over the past decade, the number of people getting any news online, whether through a news website or on social media, fell across every age group.