Bite Size Comms

I’m a news junkie. I start my day by checking the BBC News app, then switch to the Guardian app for a more in-depth read. Finally, I scroll through Apple News, which, despite the name, rarely delivers actual news. This habit probably stems from years as a diplomat. However, I’m in a shrinking minority. According to the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report, the percentage of the UK population who are “extremely” or “very” interested in news has dropped from 70% in 2015 to 37% in 2026, one of the steepest declines measured anywhere in the world. Passive, once-a-week news consumption is now the norm, not the exception.

The days of a family gathering around the television to watch either the nine o’clock or ten o’clock news are long gone. We want news instantly, digested and bite-sized. Both news organisations and independent “news creators” are chasing audiences on social and video platforms. Reuters data shows that social media and video platforms have overtaken TV and even news organisations’ own websites as weekly news sources for the first time. Yet only X and YouTube are seen by more than half of respondents as genuinely useful for news. On Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, most people said they encounter news only incidentally while scrolling for other reasons. OFCOM’s UK research confirms that more than half of adults now use social media as a primary news source. Despite this platform shift, BBC News still commands by far the largest UK reach, both offline and online, with the Guardian consistently among the next tier of top online news brands. Kind of validates my morning choice!

A more worrying trend is deliberate avoidance. Around half of UK adults say they sometimes or often avoid the news altogether, and 77% say they worry about misinformation, a level among the highest in any country surveyed. Rod Cartwright’s excellent Reputation, Risk and Resilience report frames this starkly: the world feels more divided, fragmented and insular. You only have to read the news media to see this. Ah, perhaps a legitimate reason to look away, not just fatigue or laziness. 

Worth noting: this isn’t about declining literacy. New OECD PISA data shows that teenagers in the UK now rank among the global top ten in reading, maths and science. A genuine achievement worth celebrating, even if we shouldn’t be complacent.

Why does this matter to public relations practitioners?

Firstly, regular news scanning is our horizon-scanning function. It helps us spot trends, opportunities, and emerging risks before they become widely known. Intelligence, if you like. Even world leaders aren’t immune to information fatigue: Donald Trump has long preferred brief, bulleted intelligence summaries to full daily briefings, arguing that lengthy detail isn’t useful to him. 

Secondly, as traditional news audiences shrink, especially among public sector organisations that rely on earned media to reach people, practitioners must lean more heavily into direct channels such as owned social content and community platforms. We should diversify beyond earned media, build direct-to-audience channels, and monitor sentiment through social listening.

It’s not a magic fix, but it’s now a necessary complement to traditional media relations, not an alternative.

[Image of newspapers from Unsplash+]