In 2021, people got tired of the news

The Future. After the political upheavals and pandemic panic of 2020, Americans lowered their news intake in 2021 considerably. While this may be healthy for Americans, it’s not great news for the news industry, which may look to streaming as a Hail Mary to re-engage lost audiences.

Primetime stress
America is turning off the news.

• Viewership of primetime news is down 36% across the three major news networks — Fox, CNN, and MSNBC.
• Downloads of the top twelve new publishers’ apps dropped 33%.
• Social media engagement of news articles plummeted 65%.
• Visits to websites of the top mainstream news publishers were down 8%.

Surprisingly and encouragingly, traffic to “hyper-partisan” publishers suffered an even bigger drop-off in engagement.

At this point, it seems like we’re all just a little too burnt out from the news.