This may help to explain this may help to explain this blog's falling traffic numbers. Via the Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Allsop writes: Should we ‘publish less’ on the pandemic? Excerpt:
Yesterday, Neal Rothschild and Sara Fisher of Axios, shared some troubling data from NewsWhip, a social-media analytics firm. “New coronavirus cases in the US have never been higher,” they wrote in summary, but “online interest in the pandemic has never been lower.”
In the last two weeks, news stories about covid-19 saw their lowest level of engagement on social media (likes, shares, and so forth) since early March, when interest in the pandemic was on an upward trajectory.
That’s not because there’s less covid journalism to engage with: the number of stories appearing now is comparable to the summer months, Rothschild and Fischer report, and cable-news mentions of the pandemic have persisted at a high level. (Surprise! Trump’s claim that mainstream outlets would stop covering “covid, covid, covid… covid, covid, covid” once the election was over was wrong.) Rather, they conclude, “lower interest—not less media coverage—is responsible for the lower engagement.”
Engagement, of course, is not the only way of measuring news consumption and interest, both of which elude easy quantification. Still, as the pandemic has progressed, other data points have driven at a similar conclusion. In March, news sites benefited from a pronounced covid traffic bump, but it quickly dissipated. As spring turned to summer turned to fall, other big stories—the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent protests; the election—frequently overtook the pandemic in terms of interest and media attention.
According to surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center, the percentage of respondents who said they were following covid news “very closely” declined from nearly sixty percent in March to thirty-five percent in September, with the latter figure further declining to twenty-six percent among people who support or lean toward supporting the Republican Party—a partisan attention gap that has widened considerably over time.
Overall, more people—and many more Republicans than Democrats—think the pandemic has been overhyped than think it has been minimized or treated with an appropriate level of attention.The US isn’t alone here: research published over the summer by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found a sharp rise in “news avoidance” in the UK, with most avoiders saying that covid news put them in a bad mood.
More immediately, the NewsWhip data chimes with a broader sentiment that has been much covered recently: covid fatigue. Clearly, our collective engagement—in the broader, non-social-media-specific sense of the term—with the pandemic story has not risen and fallen with the severity of the scientific facts on the ground; rather, it has responded to a complex mix of social, political, and, simply put, very human factors.
As Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton wrote in April, addressing the decline of the initial covid traffic bump, “Sustained attention is hard to maintain over time, no matter how objectively important a topic might be. The lives of nearly every American (and, of course, billions elsewhere) are now starkly different than they were a couple months ago—but their interest in news has rapidly regressed toward the mean.”
While coverage has continued at a high level—and some of it has been excellent—much of it has become routine, settling into familiar, circular grooves. Of course, living and working in the permanent state of high-pitched, anguished fury and grief that the facts here demand is hardly sustainable. The covid story is many things at once: persistently tragic, but also deeply uncertain and, sometimes, boring, all of which complicates the production of journalism. We shouldn’t be in the business of sugar-coating and false hope, nor of contriving excitement.
