With attention focused on the battle for news ratings between Channels Seven and Nine, an underlying trend has tended to go unnoticed: audiences have been switching off televised news and current affairs programs since the 1990s. Drawing on detailed OzTAM ratings, this article shows how this is particularly true for specific audience segments. Allied with this is the longer-term decline in newspaper circulation. These data raise a central question: are Australians merely switching off ‘outdated’ media such as TV and newspapers (and getting their news from somewhere else such as the internet), or are they switching off the genre of news/current affairs altogether? This article weighs the evidence and concludes that the news audience is fragmenting in particular ways, especially by age, and that some (but certainly not all) groups are going online for news.
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