Stop Blaming Google: the Real Enemy of Journalism

The real enemy of digital journalism is disconnection from the audience

In the world of digital media, every strategic discussion often begins and ends with one name: Google. Core updates, SEO volatility, drops in traffic from Google Discover, various penalties. It has almost become a Pavlovian reflex: when visits decline, blame the algorithm.

But there is a more uncomfortable truth. The real enemy of digital journalism is the growing irrelevance our work has taken on for an ever-larger share of the public, not Google.

The data show an audience pulling away

The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2024 confirms it, with the numbers to back it up:

• 39% of global users say they regularly avoid news.
• In Italy the figure stands at 36%, up 7 points in a single year.
• Among young Italians (18-24 years old), news avoidance reaches 47%.
• Trust in media is stuck at 40% globally.
• Only 38% of UK users describe themselves as “very interested” in current affairs (it was 70% in 2015).

We are facing an emotional, cognitive, cultural crisis. People are not simply less engaged. They are actively choosing to avoid us.

And when journalism is avoided, ignored, skipped, what role can it still play?

The new editorial invisibility

Even among those who still read news on websites, a growing share does so “out of sight” (and out of reach) of publishers’ revenue:

• 1 in 5 users worldwide regularly uses an ad blocker.
• Another 10% activates one occasionally.
• New privacy regulations and “reject all” cookie banners have drastically lowered consent rates on CMPs, reducing the share of monetizable traffic.
• As the Guardian’s digital director has observed, “monetizable pages are already declining” because too many users are rejecting cookies.

The result? An invisible audience that consumes news without leaving traces useful either for advertising or for editorial strategy.

An emotional problem too

If some journalists themselves publicly admit they can “no longer handle the news” to protect their own mental health, what can we expect from an audience that is more fragile, younger, and more distant?

The research explains why people avoid the news. The first reason is that news feels depressing, anxiety-inducing, unsolvable. Then there is the perception of information as biased, manipulative, irrelevant. A sense of powerlessness grows, I can’t do anything about it, or plain emotional saturation. And the appetite for alternative formats grows too: short, visual, light, contextualized. Users, meanwhile, retreat elsewhere, podcasts, creators, social media, entertainment.

It is no coincidence that almost half of young people see emotions as central to their daily choices. Anyone communicating today has to take that into account.

Misaligned newsrooms: an internal problem

There is another factor that gets little attention but matters a great deal. An internal rift runs between those who produce content and those who analyze audience behavior and decide digital strategy.

Too often, journalists and digital teams do not speak the same language. In many newsrooms, people still write as if for a print newspaper, ignoring digital practices, tools, and the signals the audience sends. And the editorial product gets judged afterward, often only by clicks, without really understanding the context, the goals of each piece, or the relationship with the reader.

Within this misalignment, technology becomes a suspect, not an ally. The result? Generation Z goes elsewhere. And it does not look back.

The attention crisis and the reading that no longer happens

The average user today does not read. They scroll. Skip. Block. Ignore.

• The attention threshold has dropped dramatically.
• The majority of users read only headlines, or do not open articles at all.
• Time spent on platforms where news arrives by “osmosis” is increasing: TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts.

All of this damages engagement, sure, but even more the social function of information. If news only gets “perceived,” without really being “read,” what is the digital information ecosystem actually transmitting?

A self-reinforcing vicious cycle

Fewer readers = less revenue = less investment in quality = more shortcuts = more distrust = fewer readers.

This is the short-circuit in which digital journalism risks imploding:

• The audience avoids news because it feels negative, useless, or heavy.
• Publishers respond by doubling down on clickbait headlines, automation, standardization, and metric obsession.
• The audience perceives the drift and pulls even further away.

We are active participants in a mechanism that, to survive, is destroying itself.

A question for the entire industry

We do not need a new shortcut for traffic or some hidden SEO secret, or a dashboard full of KPIs. We need to stop and ask ourselves:

• How did we reach the point where almost half of young people deliberately avoid news?
• When did we stop truly listening to the audience, in favor of chasing data alone?
• What happens if the next generation of readers never arrives?

There are no definitive answers. But I know for certain that the real risk is losing the connection with our readers entirely, not the next core update. Journalism does not die only because of an algorithm. It also dies when people stop believing in it, and often nobody notices until it is too late.

If you work in a newsroom, a media agency, a tech company, or you are simply a reader interested in the future of information, I want to ask you one thing. What do you see? Do you have experiences, perspectives, or reflections to share?