News has been reduced to sensationalist clickbait in 2024 – there has to be a better way

The news has been so dispiriting in 2024 that at times it felt like we all needed to adopt the brace position before reading the headlines. It’s no surprise that, according to Reuters, 46% of people in the UK actively avoid the news, which can feel a bit like a factory for the mass production of gloominess.

While we’re certainly living through dramatic and disconcerting times, though, widespread news-avoidance is also the fault of the media ecosystem itself.

Get the latest news and insight into how the Big Issue magazine is made by signing up for the Inside Big Issue newsletter

It would be difficult to design a more psychologically jarring system than constantly bombarding people on their smartphones with fast-moving reports about upsetting topics over which they have no control, and in which they are always told the beginning of stories but almost never how they end.

Not just that, but online news distribution, particularly through social media, prioritises the most partisan, shouty and sensationalist voices in the room, meaning there is an economic incentive to shock and dismay people.

There has to be a better way.

Like Big Issue, we at Delayed Gratification, the slow journalism magazine, are not afraid to do things differently – and since we launched back in 2011 we’ve tried to provide part of the solution

Each quarter we cut through the white noise of fast news, returning to the most important stories after the dust has settled to ask that simple question that is so often overlooked – ‘What happened next?’

• TV legend Carol Vorderman on death, social media and why she’s still voice of the opposition
• From conspiracies to deepfakes: Why fake news and misinformation is inevitable in the digital age

In our magazine we aim to bring context, perspective, data and expert opinion to bear to help make sense of a baffling world. We’ve kept Delayed Gratification proudly independent (no sinister billionaire backers for us), advertising free and non-partisan, and our subscribers have enabled us to fund ambitious investigations in challenging countries across the world.

We stand for a calmer, more balanced approach to the news that seeks to inform rather than alarm. When we report on the problems of the world we also aim to delve into potential solutions.

It’s not the answer in itself – quite apart from anything else, if you only got your news from Delayed Gratification you wouldn’t yet have discovered that Donald Trump had been re-elected as US president (although you might quite like that) – but it is perhaps a step in the right direction.

And there are things to feel positive about. People are starting to become much more aware of the insidious influence of social media-driven news and are voting with their feet, leaving platforms like X, which have descended into partisan misinformation. Campaigns are being mounted to give kids the chance of a childhood free of smartphone-driven anxiety.

Substack is providing a home for serious, in-depth, reader-funded journalism, and in the last 18 months, three credible new London news sources – The Londoner, London Centric and London Spy – have all launched, signalling a comeback for local news journalism in the UK, after a torrid few years of layoffs and closures.

Perhaps 2025 will be the year we start to prioritise a better, healthier news ecosystem that doesn’t make us all want to switch off.

Rob Orchard is the co-editor of Delayed Gratification and co-author of new book Misc., a compendium of delightfully random facts. You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. This Christmas, you can make a lasting change on a vendor’s life. Buy a magazine from your local vendor in the street every week. If you can’t reach them, buy a Vendor Support Kit.