What is news avoidance, and what exactly are people quitting?

Summary: News avoidance is skipping the news on purpose, sometimes or often, and 42% of people across 48 markets did it in 2026. Most avoiders are selective: They still want to know what happened, and they've quit the delivery that made knowing feel like a job. Quitting that delivery, with one bounded input in its place, leaves you better informed than the feed did.

Most people who quit the news still want to know what happened. They've walked away from a delivery system: A feed with no bottom, and an alert during dinner about the twelfth rewrite of the same story. Researchers call the behavior news avoidance and measure it as skipping the news on purpose, sometimes or often. In practice it looks like a refusal of a format.

Avoiders' own reasons point the same way. In the Reuters Institute's 2025 report, avoiders describe overload (one respondent: "It's too much"), a mood that sinks with each update, powerlessness over wars and economic gloom, arguments that turn toxic, and news that doesn't feel relevant to their lives. Every item on that list except relevance comes from volume and delivery, and relevance is the one complaint about the facts themselves. The facts of a war don't get grimmer at one update a day. By the fiftieth update of the week you've learned nothing new and felt worse each time.

What is news avoidance?

In the Reuters Institute's Digital News Report, news avoidance means answering "sometimes" or "often" when asked whether you actively avoid the news. In the 2026 report, 42% of respondents across 48 markets said so, flat on the year and up from 29% in 2017, when the question was first asked. In Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, and Turkey, 60% or more now say it. Our news fatigue post carries the full country numbers.

The 42% hides two different groups, which the Reuters Institute's 2025 report separates. Consistent avoiders care little about news to begin with and tend to have less formal education, and they have stopped. Selective avoiders are overloaded and ration the news by time of day or by topic. They're still reading, at a dose they can live with.

Who is avoiding the news?

The group is larger than the word suggests. In August 2025, 36% of US adults told Pew Research Center they keep up with the news all or most of the time, down from 51% in 2016, per its survey. The American Press Institute's April 2026 study found that roughly one American in three feels overwhelmed by the news or finds it too stressful, seven in 10 often or sometimes avoid celebrity news, and roughly three in five avoid news about Trump and national politics.

What gets avoided is topics and times: Celebrity coverage, national politics, and particular hours of the day, which is exactly what a selective avoider cuts. Younger readers lead the trend. In the 2025 Reuters report, under-35s were more likely than older readers to say the news leaves them feeling powerless, doesn't feel relevant to their lives, or is too hard to follow.

Is quitting the news rational?

The strongest case against quitting is the civic one. A person who avoids the news votes without knowing the candidates, misses the ballot measure that raises their rent, and hears about the evacuation order from a neighbor. For consistent avoiders that cost is real, and no change of format reaches a reader who has stopped caring. A bounded briefing only helps people who still want the news, and the Reuters data says a minority of avoiders don't.

For the selective majority, the evidence points the other way. In the week after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, people who watched the coverage for six hours a day or more reported higher acute stress than people directly exposed to the attack, per a 2014 PNAS study. Hours of coverage didn't leave those viewers better informed about the bombing. By the second day the facts fit in a paragraph, and the extra hours bought dread. A 2025 study in BMC Psychology links doomscrolling, cycling through bad news without an off-ramp, to poorer sleep.

Most news, on most days, also contains nothing a reader can act on before the next update. A budget fight resolves in months and a war in years, and the fiftieth update changes no decision you'll make this week.

So quitting is rational when what you quit is the part that adds dread without adding fact, and that part is most of the delivery and almost none of the information.

What exactly should you quit?

Quit formats and keep sources. Five swaps, each of which works with a newspaper, a radio, or an RSS reader:

1. Quit the feed, keep one or two outlets. A timeline sorts for reaction and a front page sorts for importance. Pick the one or two sources you'd trust on a bad day and open them directly.

2. Quit alerts, keep a time. Turn off push notifications and read once in the morning, maybe once in the evening. The world holds the news until you look, and a story read at 11 PM gains nothing over the same story read at 7 AM.

3. Quit the open-ended session, keep a format with an end. A printed paper, a weekly magazine, an email digest, and a daily podcast all have a last page or a last minute. A timeline has neither, and that boundary separates informed from hooked.

4. Quit the topic flood, keep the topic. The war you've been avoiding deserves one good piece a week more than it deserves fifty alerts. Skipping the subject costs you the facts, and skipping the fifty alerts costs you nothing.

5. Quit reading for mood, keep reading for decisions. Before you open a story, ask what you'd do differently after reading it. If the answer is nothing, the story can wait for the weekly roundup.

Publishers won't do this for you, because fewer alerts mean fewer clicks, so the discipline stays with the reader. The case for reading less news explains why less works, and a seven-day plan walks through the swaps in order.

What replaces the feed

One bounded input a day replaces it, and the channel matters less than the boundary. For us at informed.now the bounded input is a short news research briefing each weekday morning by text, read in a few minutes, with no feed behind it. A newspaper at breakfast draws the same boundary on paper. So does a weekly magazine, if a week is the dose you can take.

News avoidance looks like people walking away from the news, and mostly it's people walking away from a delivery built to keep them scrolling. Most of them still want to know what happened. A delivery with an end gives them that, and the facts survive the switch.