Traditional Media in Trouble — From Deepfakes to Polarising Content Here are 9 Ways News is Changing

Nearly 39 percent of people worldwide said they sometimes or often actively avoid the news, up 10 percent from 2017.

Avoidance of the news is at a record high, according to the Oxford-based Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which produced a 168-page Digital News Report 2024 analysis.

The research indicates that we are currently at the start of a technology shift to the media and platform environment with considerable challenges for the news industry and society at large.

As someone who has just started working as a journalist in Prague, I am of course reckoning with this transition and looking at ways our journalism can be more integral in people’s lives. In one way, we have to make people care.

Those who do seem to care tend to be highly-educated individuals and from different socio-economic conditions that the least advantaged in society. So, on some level this is a class problem. On another level, we certainly can’t blame those who are not interested in the news because of their negativity and the general sense of powerlessness those who view the news have.

We all know the feeling.

Whether it’s Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Palestine, Sudan, Ethiopia, the looming threat of Donald Trump’s return, the resurgence of the far-right in Europe (have they ever truly gone away, we might ask), climate change…