Avoiding the News: Vanishing Audiences for Journalism

Cross-country study of media habits and information use of people who use little to no news. Stage 1 of the project involved in-depth interviews with "news avoiders" in the United Kingdom (2016-2017) followed by stage 2 (2017-2018) in Spain using a similar design. Stage 3 has involved in-depth interviews with both news avoiders and a contrasting group of news "enthusiasts" in Iowa amidst the 2019 presidential campaigns. A fourth stage of the project will involve follow-up interviews with a subset of those individuals in Iowa in 2020 and a survey fielded on a nationally representative sample of U.S. residents to assess the representativeness of attitudes about news and relationships observed in the qualitative portion of the study.