The award will be presented by the Mass Communication and Society Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) at the AEJMC 2026 Annual Conference in New Orleans.
In their study, our colleagues disentangled two types of news avoidance: intentional news avoidance and low news consumption. They identified different types of news avoiders based on individuals’ level of news consumption and their intention to avoid the news. Additionally, they investigated which political and media perceptions predict belonging to a certain type of news avoider. One of the main findings is that low news consumption reflects a general detachment from media and politics, while intentional news avoidance stems from the need to take a break from emotionally burdensome news. As such, the article informs academic research on the highly societally relevant phenomenon of news avoidance, while also offering practical guidance to the news industry by empirically distinguishing between different forms of disengagement from news.
The award-winning article can be found here (open-access): https://doi.org/10.1080/15205436.2024.2304759