I’ve become acutely aware of the sea change that occurs when you move from working inside the media to operating outside it:
Journalists live in an environment where news is the central organising principle of daily life – every quote carries weight. You become hardwired into both the economics of news and the psychology of news-gathering.
Once you step out of that world, the contrast is stark. Most people do not live in a state of constant news-level urgency. Their attention is divided across work, family, errands, rising prices, quality of life concerns, planning a holiday… even when serious political news is the order of the day, it may register somewhere in the back of their minds, but it bar some exceptions, it rarely competes with the demands of daily life.
This is a deep engagement gap: journalists consume and interpret news with a level of intensity that the public neither shares nor necessarily wants. Jacob Nelson’s recent piece for the Nieman Lab 2026 predictions articulates this clearly: most people are not hostile to news, neither deeply engaged with it – they are simply apathetic. And not out of ignorance, but because the news competes poorly with entertainment, or convenience, and habit.
The lesson for ANYONE seeking out the media, is sobering:
- Not all news, even when important, is readable. Not all good journalism is consumed. And not all platforms reward depth. Smartphone apps are now the dominant attention sinks (for me it is Tik-Tok, Instagram, YouTube, and then the New York Times app) and journalism competes in that environment whether it wants to or not.
- The Broadcasting Authority survey (download here) reinforces this gap in a Maltese context: if 89% of online viewers use Facebook for Maltese news and current affairs, to me this is where headlines must set the agenda and emotional connection before readers click forward to learn more.
- You need a different language (yawn!) when taking your digital content across apps with different demographics – your curated Instagram content might not have any life on Tik-Tok because users’ expectations of what they see on that app are totally different from what is expected elsewhere.
- News consumption in Malta, like everywhere else, is shaped less by the intrinsic value of journalism and more by the structures through which people encounter it.
TLDR
Understanding attention, not assuming engagement, is a core skill in journalism and public relations.
Most people are not adversarial toward news. They simply don’t engage with it deeply. To reach audiences, we must work within the pathways people actually use – not the ones we assume they should.
