Years of year-end predictions reveal a journalism industry battered about by change. Past predictions chronicle the bumpy adaptation to economic precarity, unstable alliances with platforms, so many technology innovations, real physical threats, and a host of other developments that are often challenges and sometimes opportunities.

These topics are all important and worthy of our attention, but we also need to step back and take a broader look at the state of journalism not as an industry or a practice but as part of public life. To put it drastically: Will 2025 mark a tipping point in which wide swathes of people are really done with news?

I’m opening myself up to accusations of overstatement, especially in raising this question on a website dedicated to journalism read by people similarly dedicated to journalism. I am not predicting the widespread demise of journalism over the next twelve months. Rather, I want to point to a more mundane phenomenon where news becomes less important and news consumption less ritualized for larger numbers of people — including many who read this site.

This isn’t a new development, as the growing literature on news avoidance continues to show. Past news consumption is certainly overestimated, particularly when there were fewer other options. But my concerns are not merely about the technological availability of diverse content crowding out news. After all, there has remained a cultural narrative that news is good and we ought to be informing ourselves as part of being good citizens and community members. In 2025, I predict we’ll see a further erosion of this collective belief, affecting not only how we use news but how we think about news.

These questions are top of mind for me as I spend my research time thinking about the idea of “news discouragement” — the ways in which we are told that we should avoid certain types of news or that the ways in which we don’t use news come to be seen as justified and right.

Donald Trump echoed and amplified a long-running right-wing critique of journalism as politically biased, raising its status to that of an enemy, and encouraging supporters to seek alternative paths for information (including his own social media platform). These critiques are not about individual stories or journalists, but about institutional corruption that renders all news suspect. We cannot dismiss such sentiments are marginal; surveys show that they are widely held.

But there are other forms of news discouragement we need to pay attention to — including something far more ordinary about tuning out the news as a way of centering our individual wellbeing. We understand that what makes news news is often its tragic element: crime, war, destruction, death. Add to this the pain of watching a political regime that one opposes and the news becomes unbearable. At the same time, we’re in a cultural moment that, quite positively, is marked by an enhanced focus on mental health and openly confronting personal struggles. News can be too much.

It could be that Trump’s reelection sparks a journalistic renaissance, echoing the parade of quality investigative journalism that emerged during his first term. It could be we rely on journalists more than ever when faced with threats of democratic backsliding. It could be that journalism provides some semblance of solidarity. But it could also be that, for many, 2025 marks a receding of news from our consciousness as a way of coping with deeply felt confusion and fear. Instead of engaging in endless updates and doomscrolling, we may instead turn inward, away from news. If this is the case, the implications go far beyond what this means for the news industry to instead question the state of our collective sensemaking as we face the unknown.