Trump fatigue leading to dropping traffic on news sites?

[ergophobe]

The 2016 election spurred a lot of news reading and a lot of new print news subscriptions. But then fatigue sets in. We've seen it here with multiple threads about reading less news.

So far I've only seen one headline on the topic and I didn't bother to read the article because, frankly, I don't really care about the horse race aspect of media (who's up, who's down) except in broad terms.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/05/breitbart-traffic-numbers-are-cratering

Still haven't read it, but today my Promotions inbox had a letter from Monica Bauerlein (editor of Mother Jones). Just back from a manjor journalism conference, she write:

A lot of the chatter in the hallways was a hunch that, over the last couple of months, readers have started paying less attention to the quick-churn news cycle. Have you? Thinking is, that could partially explain the (off-the-record) murmurings from industry vets about declining web traffic after the spikes when Donald Trump was elected.

That pretty much tracks with what a number of news junkies here have been saying.

[littleman]

The investigative journalism is doing a public service and should be supported, but we do not want to wallow in it.

[ergophobe]

The investigative journalism is doing a public service and should be supported, but we do not want to wallow in it.

Interesting you should say that. I read the amazing article that Mother Jones did about commercial prisons and at the end was a plea: investigative journalism like this isn't cheap. A link gave a rundown to all the costs of creating an article like that, including paying a journalist's salary for several months while he was "on the inside" working as a prison guard while researching his story.

I agreed with the importance of the mission and donated to Mother Jones based on that one article, though I have never been a Mother Jones reader. Even as a donor, I read fewer MJ articles per year than I read Le Monde articles per day.

[rcjordan]

> do not want to wallow in it

I peek once in the morning, then shut it off (with filters). Even then, it is wearing me down.

[Drastic]

It's gone so click-baity and all about sensationalism, not actual truth or what most of us would call actual "NEWS."

It's like regular news headlines today are what I would see plastered all over the National Enquirer in a checkout line 10 years ago.

[rcjordan]

SNL skit quote:

Everything old is new again. Producers are abusing starlets, there are Nazis marching in the street, suddenly nude pantyhose are on trend. I've never felt more at home. When's polio coming back? This'll be fun.