News fatigue is real, here's what the data says

Summary: 42% of people across nearly fifty countries now avoid the news on purpose, up from 29% in 2017. The top reasons in the Reuters Institute's 2025 survey include mood, volume, war coverage, and powerlessness. Fatigue makes you skim and miss what mattered, so the fix is less volume with a hard stop, not more willpower.

The Reuters Institute's Digital News Report has tracked the same trend for the better part of a decade: More people are tuning out, on purpose. Fix your news diet is the fix.

The avoidance numbers

42% of people across nearly fifty countries now say they sometimes or often actively avoid the news, per the Reuters Institute's 2026 Digital News Report. In 2017 it was 29%. The United States is at 45%, the United Kingdom at 50. In Australia, a 2025 University of Canberra report found more than seven in ten people under 35 steer clear of current affairs.

That's thirteen points in nine years, and each time the survey asks why, the same reasons come back.

Why people say they're avoiding it

1. It makes them feel worse. The top reason in Reuters' 2025 survey, and the simplest.

2. There's too much of it. People who care about the world describe being worn out by quantity alone. The feed has no off switch.

3. The war coverage. Years of relentless conflict reporting, and people stepping away specifically to stop seeing it.

4. Powerlessness. "I can't do anything about this." With no agency over the events, you eventually disengage.

A fifth reason shows up in the Reuters Institute's 2022 report: Distrust. People who suspect they're being fed outrage on purpose stop trusting the source as well as the story.

Most avoiders still think the news matters. What they've given up on is the experience of consuming it, which is a design problem, and design problems have design fixes.

What fatigue does to a person

A 2026 American Psychiatric Association poll found 62% of Americans very or somewhat anxious about current events. The American Press Institute's 2026 Media Insight Project study found about one in three Americans feel overwhelmed by the news or find it too stressful. A 2022 study in Health Communication linked problematic news consumption to worse mental and physical health.

An anxious reader skims, and a skimming reader misses the one line that mattered, so the volume ends up defeating the purpose it was supposed to serve.

Who's quitting

The avoiders skew young. Under-35s are more likely to disengage than older adults, Reuters has found. Women report being worn out by news volume more often than men. And many avoiders are selective: They struggle with news overload and cut back at certain times or on certain topics. Why people are quitting the news profiles both groups.

If you brace yourself before opening a news app, the app is doing something wrong, and if you skim two hundred headlines to find the five that mattered, so is the feed.

What we did with the data

We designed informed.now for the avoiders, and specifically for the selective ones. It's one text every weekday morning, at a time you choose, with 5 to 7 news summaries picked by the only filter that survives fatigue: How much does this change the lives of how many people? Links go to the source rather than to a hot take about it, and the brief has a hard stop, with nothing after it until tomorrow.

You need less news, better chosen, in a place that doesn't hurt to open. What's SMS news? explains the format we chose and why the channel is half the cure.