Why the TikTok era spells trouble for the establishment

COMMUTING on public transport has always provided a convenient opportunity to assess changing forms of media consumption. Seventy years ago, you would have seen a sea of heads buried in newspapers. From around 15 years ago, it was eyes glued to screens. At first glance, the picture today is similar, but that misses a subtle difference. Previously those screens tended to show words; now you’ll glimpse the tell-tale flickering of a never-ending stream of bite-sized videos.

The latter shift may seem much more subtle than the former, but I’m not sure that’s true.

Print has been in decline for several decades, but perhaps less appreciated is the cratering in consumption of any written news at all. The share of adults reading news articles online in the United States has fallen from 70 per cent to 50 per cent since 2013. The share of Britons and Americans now consuming no conventional news media at all has ballooned from 8 per cent to around 30 per cent. While the decline of print was mainly a problem for newspapers’ bottom lines, the decline in all news consumption is a problem for society.