The challenge of news avoidance is one facing news publishers around the world. While it’s critical to provide audiences with news of what’s happening, that same news is also driving many people away.

During this week’s Webinar, Understanding news avoidance from a data perspective, INMA members learned how negative news affects readership and what news media companies can do to provide a balance of content that will engage more readers.

The Webinar, part of the INMA Smart Data Initiative, featured Roza Dorresteijn, data scientist for the DPG Media news analytics team in The Netherlands and Denmark.

Dorresteijn began her presentation with results from the Reuters Digital News Report, which showed that since 2017, the number of people “actively avoiding” news has increased.

Although the percentage varies slightly among different researchers, those numbers average out to around 40% of people avoiding the news. And while that’s often attributed to people not trusting the news, Dorresteijn said the reality is the news tends to create negative feelings among people.

“There’s a lot of things going on in the world, and it doesn’t make you very cheerful when you open the newspaper or your newspaper app,” she said, adding that the effect is amplified if people don’t know what to do with that information.

“So it’s not only that it’s negative, but it also … makes people helpless or feel powerless.”

In addition to causing people to avoid the news, negative news is changing the way people view the world. The perception of the world’s problems is often worse than the reality of situations because audiences are so accustomed to only hearing negative reports.

For example, when asked about the unemployment rate in their region, people in 14 countries greatly overestimated the actual rate.

Similarly, people’s perception of crime is much higher than the statistics indicate. Although people in the United States tend to believe that crime rates are higher now than one year ago, the fact is that crime rates have been declining for years: “[All crimes] decrease in numbers but that’s not how people feel. So people feel less safe every year, and they think their country is becoming more criminal — but that’s not actually the case.”

Those perceptions began changing around the year 2000 — not coincidentally, about the same time news headlines started becoming more negative. As news became more negative, readers’ negative emotions also increased. Paradoxically, users clicked on negative news stories more often, even though it decreased their feelings of happiness. And publishers continued providing negative headlines and stories because users clicked on them.

Analysing sentiment

To explore this paradox, Dorresteijn said she turned to sentiment analysis, which determines the sentiment or emotion in a piece of text.

DPG built its own model that uses natural language processing and machine learning techniques to classify content as positive, negative, or neutral. Then, by analysing the sentiment of articles, it can gain insights into user preferences and tailor the content accordingly.  

The model isn’t in production yet, but Dorresteijn was able to share what it has learned from users so far. Data showed a lot of negative news being reported by DPG on crime, justice, safety, road accidents, and the weather. That, she said, forms readers’ worldview.

“It’s not weird that people overestimate crime if there’s just negative information coming to you about crime,” she said, adding that the news doesn’t mention when crime rates decrease, nor does it offer solutions on how to make neighbourhoods safer.

In addition to analysing the sentiment of stories, DPG looked at reader behaviour and how they engage with positive and negative stories. It found the paradoxes continue: Negative articles have a higher read percentage overall, but short positive stories have a higher read percentage than longer negative ones.

And while negative articles in the first position on the homepage yield more clicks and drive more conversions than neutral and positive ones, they have fewer pageviews overall. This seemingly conflicting behaviour, she said, “illustrates that you have to look at different things” to fully understand what drives reader behaviour.

What we can learn from others

In addition to sharing what DPG Media is learning about reader behaviour and negative news, Dorresteijn presented experiments from other news media companies.

Germany’s Rheinishce Post collaborated with the Bonn Institute to experiment with “human-friendly news”— stories that were positive or gave different perspectives and had good outcomes.

“They saw the session duration and the number of sessions from people reading these human-friendly articles increasing,” she said. “It was the same for the reading time on the article itself and the engagement, or how often people come to the site.”

Similarly, Deutsche Welle experimented with posting only constructive news on Facebook in late 2018/early 2019. During this experimental time, its reach increased by 423%, and new followers went up 400%.

DPG’s own NU.nl is an online platform, and staff interviewed readers to find out what they wanted to read. After discovering a growing interest in positive news, the site started writing positive articles and asking for readers’ opinions on them.

Compared with other articles on the site, the good news articles earned the highest level of reader satisfaction.

NU.nl also learned more about what drives news avoidance among its readers:

“They found that news avoidance happens from a lack of interest in too many details, especially when we talk about negative news,” Dorresteijn said. “It could be that they want to know why the war is happening and what is happening broadly, but they don't want to get [news] a few times a day on new attacks.”

And while negative news earns more clicks, Dorresteijn said NU.nl also found that news that surprises readers — either positive or negative — performs best: “So that’s something to think about; how to bring your positive news just to give this surprise effect as well.”

NU.nl started a free push notification subscription for good news articles. It also ensures that a lighthearted or positive article is on the homepage’s first 12 positions. In addition, it has a special good news section.

In reviewing the data for last month, Dorresteijn said she discovered that articles tagged as good news were averaging 180,000 views compared to 120,000 for other articles — contradicting previous data showing that negative news receives more clicks.

“It’s different from what we saw about negative headlines clicking better, but it works well for them.”

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