Alerts fatigue, or would that be journalism fatigue?

The Guardian picked up an interesting finding (among many interesting ones) from the 2025 edition of the Digital News Report, perhaps the world’s largest press survey, produced annually by the Reuters Institute:

Analysis by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that 79% of people surveyed on the subject around the world said they did not currently receive any news alerts during an average week. Crucially, 43% of those who did not receive alerts said they had actively disabled them. They complained of receiving too many or not finding them useful, according to the research, which covered 28 countries.

There was a time, around 2014, when phone notifications were seen as a phone’s “premium real state,” a battleground for people’s attention, who were already saturated by the volume of digital information.

Unsurprisingly, the notification area also ended up saturated and discarded as yet another digital dumping ground. I suspect many people don’t even care what’s there, accumulating dozens, hundreds of unread, ignored notifications.

The obvious focus of the Reuters Institute research, journalism, reminded me of an excellent short piece by Ricardo Fiegenbaum, a researcher at objETHOS, a research group from Federal University of Santa Catarina. A decidedly non-academic text [pt_BR] (in the best sense), in which he thinks aloud about journalism’s place today:

It’s in this mined, paradoxical, complex and uncertain terrain that I enter when I think about journalism. And every question that presents itself in this scenario — logical, ideological, pragmatic, technological, discursive, etc. — always leads me to the fundamental question: what are we talking about when we talk about journalism?

It’s a good question.

I suspect the fatigue transcends notifications and that much of what’s currently understood as “journalism” escapes one of the profession’s noblest definitions, one that Ricardo mentions: serving societies’ information needs.

From the archives: in 2022, in light of that year’s Digital News Report edition, I was asking myself — echoing Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso — who reads so much news anyway [pt_BR].