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Welcome to Future of Journalism, a podcast from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.

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I'm going to be head of Leadership and Development at the Institute.

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Yeah. A special series of our podcast and it's dedicated to Religion News Report 2022.

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Over seven episodes we diving into the most comprehensive piece of research on news consumption while.

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In this episode of the series, we're joined by Kirsten Eddy, research fellow at the Institute and co-author of the original news report.

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As part of the report, Houston co-authored a special chapters on how audiences in several countries are engaging with news about the war in Ukraine.

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We look at what sources of news people pay most attention to how people are.

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Read the news media coverage of the war and how the war has affected rates of selective news avoidance,

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a trend that we have highlighted as one of the key findings of this year report.

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And you can learn more about it listening to the first episode of the series with Nick Newman in Nielsen, Pakistan.

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Welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Federica. It's great to be here.

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So the war in Ukraine started after we carry out the main survey, which digital news report is based on.

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What did you do to learn about how people are engaging with the news about the war?

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As soon as the war in Ukraine started, we really wanted to better understand how people have been accessing news about the conflict and

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to see what impact this might have on some of the trends that we'd found in our main survey.

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So we ended up commissioning YouGov to carry a separate follow up survey in five countries Brazil, Germany, Poland, the UK and the US.

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And in that we included both new questions specifically about the conflict,

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as well as a handful of key questions from the main digital news report survey.

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So things like news, interest, use, avoidance and trust.

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And this allowed us to to directly compare our pre conflict results from the main 2022 survey and the during conflict follow up survey.

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Why did you choose these specific countries?

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We chose these countries because they helped us to gauge both differences and similarities based on different levels of proximity to the conflict,

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ranging from Poland, which directly borders Ukraine to countries like Brazil and the US, which are on entirely different continents.

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Across these five countries. What are the news audiences saying about how closely they're following the conflict?

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Across all five, we find that a majority are following the conflict at least somewhat closely, though the attention is highest in Germany,

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which is not just geographically close to Ukraine,

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but it's also a place where ordinary people are feeling the effects of the conflict on things like energy prices.

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This attention attention is lowest in Brazil, which is politically and geographically farthest from the conflict.

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So not necessarily surprising. How does this compare with engagement with news in general or any differences with age or gender, for example?

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For the most part, what we see here is in line with our main survey data on those who are not consuming any news sources

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at all in markets like the U.S. and the U.K. But we do see that in countries like Brazil and Germany,

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the proportion of 18 to 24 year olds who are not following the conflict at all is particularly high when we compare it to other age groups.

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And I think in places like the U.S. and the U.K., we see that women are slightly more likely than men to not be paying close attention to the war.

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You look at what sources of information and news people pay attention most to when it comes to the war.

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What does a researcher.

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It was immediately clear, as we've we've seen with other major world events in the past, that people turn more to TV news at times of crisis.

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We asked respondents which news source they're paying the most attention to when it comes to the conflict.

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And television news tops the list for three of our five countries, particularly Germany and Brazil.

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We also see a lot of attention to online sources overall.

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So when we combine online news sites, non-mainstream sites and social media, this is particularly prominent in places like the US and Poland.

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Again, do you see any differences in behaviours according to age or any other factor?

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We do see some differences, mainly by age and by country.

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The most obvious one reflects what we also find in our main survey,

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which are the splits we see in television versus social media use between younger and older cohorts.

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So in the U.K., for instance,

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people who are 55 and older are far more likely than 18 to 24 year olds to pay the most attention to TV news on the conflict.

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And then nearly eight times as many, 18 to 24 year olds are paying the most attention to social media.

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News on the war as those who are 55 and older.

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And we also see that TV is a dominant source about the conflict in countries like Germany.

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But social media is uniquely important in a country like Brazil.

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You also poll people on how much they're avoiding the news.

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Meaning we can compare levels both before and after the beginning of the war.

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Do you see any shifts in any of the countries you look at and can you actually put it down to the war in particular?

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Yeah, we were particularly interested in whether some of the key trends that we found in our main survey, especially as,

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as you just noted, increases in news avoidance were reversed by the extensive and extensive coverage of this war.

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And we actually find little evidence that these trends of news avoidance have been reversed even temporarily.

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And in some cases we find possible evidence they've actually been accelerated from it.

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So in Germany, Poland and the U.S., the proportion who say that they sometimes or often actively avoid the news has actually increased.

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News avoidance in Germany is up by seven percentage points just from shortly before to during the conflict.

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And to put that in context,

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that increase that we see in just two months is larger than what we saw in the five years from 2017 to 2022 in news avoidance in Germany.

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This isn't necessarily surprising because we know that one of the main reasons that

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people avoid the news is because of the negative effect that it has on their mood.

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And we also know that war coverage is, of course, by its nature, deeply depressing and concerning.

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But in some countries where news avoidance was already quite high, like the U.K. and Brazil,

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we don't see evidence of a further increase, but we also don't see a decrease in these places either.

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And I think in terms of your question of whether we can truly attribute this specifically to coverage of the war,

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no, I think it's important that we be cautious about this.

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I think just to take one example, we do know that other major domestic stories, for instance,

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the party gate scandal in the United Kingdom were unfolding at the same time as the conflict.

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And these may have also influenced people's attitudes and behaviours around the news.

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That's super important. Thank you. But so does people who say they're avoiding the news.

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Are they shunning it completely or is something more nuanced occurring?

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This is a great question. We do see that in places like Poland, despite the increase in news avoidance,

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the proportion of people who say that they access news several times a day did substantially increase.

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And in Poland, we find that around 40% of people who access news several times a day during the

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conflict are also saying that they sometimes or often actively avoid the news.

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So I think what these things together tell us is that news avoidance and news use are not mutually exclusive and that people can make a

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conscious decision to moderate their news use or perhaps just avoid coverage on particular topics while still regularly checking in with it.

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As coverage of the war managed to reverse any of the downward trends in the proportion of people who say they're really interested in the news.

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This is a bit of a mixed picture.

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Like news use, we see the biggest change in in news interest in Poland, where interest is up from before the conflict.

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But because declines in news interest have been so steep since 2020, this increase really only represented a return to 2021 levels.

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In the other countries that we studied here, we really found that interest has either been unaffected or in places like Brazil continues to fall.

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So I think despite the severity of the conflict,

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it's done little to reverse some of the declining levels of interest in most countries, even in the short term.

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And lastly, Kirsten, you asked several question around how useful people think news coverage of the war is.

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What did you what are you trying to find out and what did you find out?

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Yeah. Yeah, we we did ask these questions. We really wanted to gauge how people feel about the media's performance covering the war.

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And these were reflective of similar questions that we had asked in the past about media coverage of the coronavirus pandemic.

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So we asked people to rate how well the news media have done, keeping people up to date on this conflict,

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on explaining its wider implications, and on providing a range of different perspectives on it.

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And what we see here is that the news media are broadly seen to be doing overall a good job with coverage,

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especially on keeping people up to date on the latest news, but less so on explaining its implications or offering a range of perspectives.

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And I think as the war continues, and particularly as we continue to see new atrocities occurring on a daily basis,

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it's it's probably likely that providing alternative perspectives is not really going to be seen by journalists as their most pressing task.

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But I do think that as the conflict persists,

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it will be especially important for newsrooms to refocus efforts around explaining its wider implications.

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And it is possible that offering some of this helpful context may actually draw in a segment

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of news avoiders who simply want clearer and more relevant information on the conflict.

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Thank you so much for joining us today. And help is helping us understand this complicated matter.

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My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

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Our guest today was Kirsten Eddy, postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute and co-author of the Digital News Report.

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Thank you all for listening to this episode of Digital News Report 2022 Podcast Series.

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You can catch up another episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts if you want to read our report in full.

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You can find it online and digital news reporter August 20, 22.

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And if you don't want to miss any news from the Institute,

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subscribe to our weekly newsletter by clicking the link on our Twitter bio or on our homepage.

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It was featured of journalism, a podcast by the writers easyJet. I'm digging through Cherubini and will be back soon.