Award won:

  • 2025 International Journal of Press/Politics Hazel Gaudet-Erskine Best Book Award

 

Name(s) & affiliation:

  • Benjamin Toff, University of Minnesota
  • Ruth Palmer, IE University
  • Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Copenhagen University
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Project title:

  • Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism
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Publication reference, link:

 

Tell us something about you/your team and how and why you decided to focus on this research

  • The project began at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism where Rasmus was research director at the time. In the annual Reuters Institute Digital News Report, we could see that there were millions of people who said they accessed the news less often than once a month or never at all, but we knew little about them. We wanted to understand who they were, how they lived their lives, what media they used, and how they stayed informed about things that mattered to them. When I joined the Reuters Institute as a postdoc in 2016, we conducted an initial round of inductive, qualitative interviews in the UK, which helped us begin to answer some of these questions, but it also prompted new ones. We began working closely with Ruth Palmer as we sought to study the phenomenon across multiple media and political environments (Spain and eventually the US as well). Over the years, the project extended its focus beyond the phenomenon of news avoidance itself. Studying news avoidance helped distill a variety of factors that we argue to structure all our relationships with media and journalism.
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Summarize the main takeaway of your project.

  • Convincing news avoiders of the value of journalism depends on more than making coverage more relevant. It requires an empathetic understanding of the social, political, and technological factors that makes news indispensable to some and a source of loathing to others.
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What made this project a “polcomm project”?

  • We found that one of the most consistent predictors of news avoidance across countries tends to be interest in and engagement with politics. Because news avoidance is most common among disadvantaged groups, it threatens to exacerbate existing inequalities by tilting mainstream journalism and related political institutions even further toward privileged audiences.

 

What, if anything, would you do differently, if you were to start this project again? (What was the most challenging part of this project? …& how did you overcome those challenges?)

  • One of the most challenging parts of this project involved the scale and breadth of our data collection: we conducted more than 130 interviews across three countries over a span of several years. I wouldn’t necessarily have done this differently because I think we needed to do that given our inductive approach, but we had to stop collecting data at a certain point or else we would never have been able to write the book. However, because our last interviews for the book were conducted in 2020, there are a lot of specific things that followed that we didn’t specifically capture: for example, the COVID-19 pandemic, the emergence of TikTok as an important source for news, Donald Trump’s reelection in the US. Our findings can help make sense of how audiences have responded to these developments, but I do sometimes wish we could go back in the field and keep studying how people’s relationships with the news have continued to change over the years since.
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What other research do you currently see being done in this field and what would you like to see more of in the future?

  • There has been a tremendous amount of exciting research published on news avoidance across many more country contexts and focusing on avoidance of specific topics in news or types of content. One reason for that is simply that more researchers are including questions about news avoidance in their surveys, which is great, but I do worry these survey items can be misused and abused if researchers don’t take the time to understand what they’re measuring. News avoidance is a complex phenomenon, and it takes on many different forms. We know that most people who say they avoid news also say they consume nearly as much news as anyone else. I would like to see more studies using more mixed methods and qualitative approaches to generate better ways of operationalizing these concepts.
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What’s next? (Follow-up projects? Completely new direction?)

  • Much of my research since the book has been focused on trust in news, and most recently I have been working on a series of collaborations with news organizations to test different kinds of interventions designed to change attitudes and behaviors around news consumption. For understandable reasons, news outlets tend to prioritize deepening engagement with audiences who have already shown some degree of loyalty and interest, so hard-to-reach news avoiders tend to get neglected. What’s more, so much of our book points to forces often outside the control of any individual news organization in contributing to rising levels of news avoidance, which makes it hard to know what will actually work. But we are finding some modest successes around using social media content and SMS texting to better meet audiences where they are. I hope to be able to point to more promising strategies in the future!

 

 

Awardee Interview: IJPP Hazel Gaudet-Erskine Best Book Award (2025)