Each semester, I ask my journalism students to take out their phones and share their average daily screentime, their top three apps, and the average daily time spent with those apps. The answers are exactly what you’d expect: An average of five hours a day spent primarily on social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat.

Then I ask my students how much time per day they spend on news apps. The most consistent answer: Zero minutes.

This is not meant to knock my students. After all, as their journalism professor, I’m not that different. Sure, I generally have more news apps than they do, but I spend much more time with NYT Games (daily average is 24 minutes, right around when I give up) than I do with the actual New York Times (daily average is 9 minutes). That may seem low, but it’s still higher than Americans’ average minutes per visit to news outlet websites (1 minute 45 seconds in 2022). The point is that in a crowded media environment mediated by social media platforms that increasingly bury content from news publishers, even as people spend more and more time with media, they spend little time with news.

In 2025, my hope is that journalists acknowledge this gap head-on. Instead of asking, “What can we do to make journalism more trustworthy?” or “What can we do to make journalism more profitable?” we will ask, “Why do we expect anyone to follow the news in the first place?”

This approach might help us realize that the main reasons people aren’t more engaged with news are far more mundane than what the conventional wisdom suggests. Journalism scholars like myself often devote much of our time and resources to understanding the most extreme elements of the news audience–namely those who harass journalists and those who engage with journalists. However, after years of studying news audience behavior, I believe the vast majority of the public is *apathetic *about the news. Many simply never forged meaningful news habits, and find the news itself to be far less appealing than other kinds of media that aim to entertain without the baggage of any expectation to also inform.

After all, compared with its competition — television, movies, podcasts, music — many find the news to be depressing, anxiety-inducing, boring, and exhausting. Yet, despite these obvious disadvantages, we tend to talk about news consumption as something we assume people will partake in, even as a growing body of research has shown that many people avoid the news altogether. My prediction (who am I kidding, my hope) for the next year is that journalists will set this assumption aside for good.

In addition to stripping the conversation surrounding news engagement and avoidance of any implicit judgment of the public, this approach will also get journalists thinking less about the substance of their work and more about the structures that shape how it gets presented. As the media and public affairs scholar Matthew Hindman has written, the quality of journalistic work is often less important in getting people to consume it than, say, the amount of time it takes for that work to load or other aspects of the content’s user experience.

In 2025, we’d all do well to consider that most members of the public are not the antagonists harassing journalists, nor are they the allies of journalism meaningfully engaging in its production. Most people just don’t care that much. It’s our job to try and change that.