Thinking Aloud About the Quiet Crisis in Audience for News

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

You can read a lot these days about how the emergence of AI and especially the changes in search are triggering declines in the audience for news. While that’s a very real problem, I sense that there’s a pervasive feeling among publishers of a deeper, much quieter crisis in the audience for news that people are reluctant to discuss, and that’s therefore receiving much less attention, and precious little careful thought. This week I want to try to say what I can about it.

The search/AI story is, I think, relatively straightforward. It is affecting peripheral, lower value traffic the most, and, in the aggregate, hitting hardest those publishers for whom such traffic was a larger part of their offering. That is more of a business problem for publishers, candidly, than it is a larger loss for society. Cheap, commoditized traffic was hardly the cornerstone of democracy.

To be sure, if the transformation of search eventually bleeds into most people getting news directly from a chat bot or agent, that could pose a much more fundamental problem. But I continue to think it’s way too soon to be confident that’s where we are headed.

To the extent that publishers today are being driven back to the core of the communities they have created, that might, eventually, even be a valuable trend, compelling them to focus on those communities, and how else they might serve them. I worry quite a lot, however, that so far we talk about this more than we do it.

Along similar lines, I think the industry right now is spending far too much effort trying to devise new cheap tricks to replace the old cheap traffic we have lost. That means things like new paid social campaigns and clever techniques for maxxing out on Reddit or TikTok. It’s a tactical approach to a strategic problem, and, at best, offers short-term stopgaps that only forestall a longer trend.

As I said at the outset, I also don’t think the problems here are limited to changes in search or to the impact of AI more broadly.

Every time someone subscribes to this newsletter, I get an email from Substack, which provides a nice little dopamine hit for me. Of greater interest, many of these emails also tell me how many other Substacks the new Second Rough Draft subscriber receives. Recently, I took a look at a week’s worth of these emails, and found the following: One out of every six of those new subscribers gets more than 50 other Substacks (one person gets 412!). More tellingly, the median new subscriber gets 20. (I get 10.)

Part of what’s going on here is that people are simply putting too much food on their information plates. When you do that, you “eat” a smaller proportion, which, from a publisher’s perspective, translates into falling open rates and less consumption from the average reader. Along the same lines, therefore, was the recent Atlantic article decrying the “end of reading” (especially of books and things like serious articles in the Atlantic) which along the way noted that we are, on average, actually reading more words than ever before.

The proper response to that trend is a tricky mix. To the extent what is being lost is more of the casual and unengaged traffic also implicated in the problems around search, part of what we need to do is to relax. These were never the readers that were going to sustain newsrooms, and while the advertising implications of their loss will be unavoidably negative, I have long believed that advertising will continue to decline as a source of support for news.

On the other hand, any loss of previously engaged readers should be of much greater concern. Here, one critical response is to redouble efforts to make content more distinctive. Another is to find ways to build or deepen ties to your community of readers, whether that is a locale or a community of interest. As I suggested above, while we talk about that a lot these days, I worry that the hard and innovative work of doing it is many times falling through the cracks.

In particular, the phenomenon I wrote about a couple of years ago of newsrooms too stressed to think clearly and so overburdened as to become paralyzed when they should be activated—being, in the evocative phrase from Laura Frank of COLab, “fried and frozen”-- appears to me to be both widening and deepening.

All of this is occurring in the context of many news sites never having achieved the audience size to which they and their funders initially aspired. While funder pressure to demonstrate results in these cases seems to have eased somewhat compared to a few years ago, I do worry that it could resume, especially when there is an economic downturn and hard choices about funding become even more widespread.

I know these are difficult problems, and it feels like the vibes in newsrooms, and especially among newsroom leaders, are darkening somewhat. I hope we can be more open and honest with each other in talking about this. If you’re in a position to do so, I especially welcome reactions in the comments this week, or even privately by email, about issues of audience—what you are seeing, and what might be done about it.

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