Here is something strange happening right now with how people consume news.
On one hand, everyone agrees that attention spans are shrinking. People scroll faster, click away sooner, and forget yesterday’s headline before lunch. The conventional wisdom says short content wins. Quick takes, bullet points, fifteen-second videos. Get to the point or get ignored.
On the other hand, search data tells a completely different story.
People are searching for fewer topics — but when they do search, they are going much deeper. The questions are longer. The follow-up searches are more detailed. Someone who looked up “inflation” two years ago is now searching “why does raising interest rates slow inflation if businesses just pass costs to consumers.” That is not a shrinking attention span. That is someone who genuinely wants to understand something.
So which is it? Are we getting dumber or smarter? More curious or more distracted?
The honest answer is: both things are happening at the same time, and they are not actually contradictory. Understanding why that is the case tells you something important about where journalism is going, why explainer-style writing is doing so well right now, and what people actually want when they sit down to read the news.
Search trends are one of the most honest signals we have about human curiosity. Nobody performs for a search bar. You type what you actually want to know.
And over the past few years, the pattern that has emerged is pretty consistent:
- Topic breadth is narrowing. People are not jumping between thirty different news stories in a session the way they used to. The number of distinct topics a person engages with in a given week has gone down.
- Query depth is rising. The average length and complexity of search queries has gone up. People are asking more specific, more layered questions.
- Follow-up searches are increasing. When someone lands on a topic, they keep going. They search again, look for context, seek out different explanations.
What this suggests is that people have quietly changed their relationship with news. They are being more selective about what they give their attention to — but once something gets through, they actually want to understand it properly.
The shift is not from deep to shallow. It is from wide to narrow and deep.
Think about how you personally navigate a news-heavy week. There might be five or six big stories happening at once. Do you read something about all of them? Probably not, at least not in any real way. You likely pick one or two that feel relevant or interesting to you, and you follow those more closely.
That is what the data reflects at scale.
There is a lot of confusion between these two ideas, and it matters.
Attention span, in the way most people use the phrase, refers to how long someone will sit still for content before moving on. And yes, that has shortened. Social media, notifications, and the general pace of digital life have made it harder for most people to stay focused on something passive for a long time.
But curiosity is different. Curiosity is about wanting to know more. And curiosity, at least when something genuinely captures someone’s interest, seems to be doing just fine.
The key phrase there is “when something genuinely captures someone’s interest.” That bar has actually gotten higher, not lower.
In the early days of digital news, novelty was enough. Something happening — anything — was reason to click. The information was scarce enough that just knowing about a thing felt valuable. Now information is everywhere. Novelty has no value on its own because there is always something new happening.
What people respond to now is meaning. Not just what happened, but why it matters, how it connects to other things, and what it means for them or for the world they live in.
This is not a small shift. It is a fundamental change in what journalism needs to do to earn someone’s time.
Explainer journalism is not new. But it has gone from a niche format to something that is clearly winning in terms of audience engagement and growth.
Publications like Vox built their entire identity around it. Newsletters like The Browser and Morning Brew grew fast by curating and contextualising rather than just reporting. Podcasts like Radiolab and This American Life, which take a single topic and spend an hour on it, have quietly maintained loyal audiences while fast news formats have churned through attention and burned out.
The format works because it matches what people actually want right now.
What Makes an Explainer Work
A good explainer does a few specific things:
- It assumes you know nothing going in. This is harder to do well than it sounds. It requires the writer to genuinely think about what the reader needs before they can understand the main point.
- It gives you context that news reports skip. A news report tells you the Fed raised rates again. A good explainer tells you what the Fed actually is, why it has the power to raise rates, how that mechanism is supposed to work, and why economists disagree about whether it does.
- It respects your intelligence while not requiring prior knowledge. This balance is everything. You are not being talked down to, but you are also not being thrown into a conversation mid-way through.
- It has a clear point of view about what matters. The best explainers do not just lay out facts. They tell you which facts are most important and why.
Good explainer journalism is less like a news report and more like a well-written answer from a knowledgeable friend who happens to know a lot about the topic.
That is actually a useful way to think about it. When you have a question about something complicated — your health, your mortgage, a legal situation — you do not want just raw information. You want someone who understands the information to help you make sense of it. That is the job a good explainer is doing
Here is something that probably feels familiar.
A big story breaks. You read about it. You think about it for a day or two. Then something else happens, and the first story sort of fades from your active attention. A week later, if someone asks you about it, you remember the rough shape of it but not the details. A month later, it barely feels real.
This is sometimes described as a crisis of attention or a failure of memory. But I think it is actually something simpler and more structural.
Most news stories are not finished stories. They are updates. They are the latest development in something ongoing. And ongoing stories, told only through their latest development, are almost impossible to keep track of over time.
The problem is not that people do not care. It is that the format does not give people anywhere to store the information in a useful way. You read an update, but you do not have the foundation underneath it. So the update washes over you and leaves nothing behind.
Explainer-style journalism solves this by building that foundation first. When you understand the underlying structure of a story — why something is happening, what the relevant history is, who the key actors are and what they want — then updates have somewhere to land. They connect to something you already know.
This is why stories that get the explainer treatment tend to stay with people longer. Not because the topic is more interesting, but because the format is doing something the standard update format cannot do.
The changes in how people consume news have also changed how they decide what to read in the first place.
A few years ago, the dominant model was the homepage or the feed. You opened a news site or a social media app and you let the stream of headlines wash over you. You clicked on whatever caught your eye. It was a passive, reactive way of consuming news.
That model still exists, but it is losing ground to something more deliberate.
- More people are subscribing to newsletters that curate a small number of stories per day, often with context built in.
- More people are using podcasts as their primary news format — podcasts that, by design, go deep on one or two things per episode.
- More people are saving things to read later and actually going back to read them, especially longer pieces.
- Search, rather than social media, is increasingly the starting point when someone wants to understand something they heard about.
The common thread in all of these behaviours is selectivity. People are making more deliberate choices about what they spend time on, and they are looking for formats that reward that time with genuine understanding rather than just more information.
The new attention economy is not about grabbing attention quickly. It is about being worth the attention someone has already decided to give you.
This is a genuinely important distinction for anyone who creates content or runs a publication. The old model rewarded the ability to attract clicks from passing traffic. The new model increasingly rewards the ability to be the thing someone specifically comes looking for when they want to understand something.
One thing worth clarifying, because it comes up a lot.
The move toward selectivity and depth does not mean people want longer content. It does not mean the answer is always a five-thousand-word deep dive. Length is not the same as depth.
Some of the best explainer journalism is actually quite short. A two-hundred-word explanation that gives you a genuinely clear mental model of something is more valuable than a two-thousand-word piece that circles the same points without ever quite landing.
What people want is clarity. They want to feel, at the end of reading something, that they actually understand the thing better than they did before. That can happen in five minutes or fifty minutes. The format matters less than the outcome.
This is also why bullet-point summaries and “here is everything you need to know” pieces often feel unsatisfying even when they are technically thorough. They give you the facts but not the understanding. You end a summary knowing more things, but not necessarily understanding the situation better.
The format that seems to work is one that builds understanding progressively. Start with the basic question. Answer it clearly. Then go one level deeper. Then one level deeper again. Stop when you have gotten the reader to a place where they actually get it, not when you have exhausted all the available information.
Looking at what is actually growing in news consumption, a few formats stand out as matching what people seem to want.
The Single-Topic Newsletter
Daily newsletters that cover one topic in some depth, or curate a very small number of stories with real context around each, have grown significantly. The appeal is the pre-selection. The newsletter writer has already decided what matters and why, so the reader does not have to make that judgment themselves. They trust the curator and get straight to the understanding.
The Explainer Podcast
Podcasts built around a single question per episode — shows like Planet Money, Stuff You Should Know, or Radiolab — have maintained strong, loyal audiences. The format naturally creates depth because time spent listening is time spent on one thing. You cannot skim a podcast the way you can skim an article.
The Backgrounder Article
These are pieces designed not to report news but to make existing news understandable. They explain the history, the context, the key players, and the stakes. They do not go stale quickly because they are not primarily about what happened today — they are about helping you understand the broader situation that today’s news is part of.
The Thread or Series Format
Rather than trying to cover everything in one piece, some publications are experimenting with series that build understanding over time. You read part one today, part two tomorrow, and by the end you have a much richer understanding of the topic than any single article could give you. The serialised format rewards returning readers and builds the kind of foundation that makes updates meaningful.
If you write about current events or run any kind of news-adjacent publication, the shift toward depth over breadth has some pretty direct implications.
Chasing every story is increasingly a losing strategy. If you try to cover everything, you cover nothing well. Your audience gets updates without context, and those updates do not stick. You become just another source of noise.
Becoming the go-to source on a narrower set of topics is more valuable than it used to be. When someone decides they want to understand something, they look for the source that explains it best. Being that source for a specific beat or topic is a more defensible position than being a general-purpose news aggregator.
The explanation is the product, not the news itself. The raw facts of a story are available everywhere instantly. What you can offer that has real value is the work of making those facts meaningful. That is the craft. That is what people are increasingly willing to pay for and come back for.
Trust is built through clarity, not volume. Publishing fifty stories a week does not make readers trust you more. Publishing ten stories that consistently help people understand things properly does. Every time a reader finishes something you wrote and thinks “oh, now I actually get it,” you have done something that earns a return visit
It would be easy to frame this as a temporary response to a particularly chaotic news environment, or as something specific to a certain demographic. But the search data and consumption patterns suggest it is more durable than that.
The underlying driver is a change in the information environment that is not going away. When information is scarce, any information has value. When information is abundant, only useful information has value. We have been in the abundant phase for a while now, and people’s behaviour is catching up to that reality.
The news organisations and writers who are growing their audiences right now are, by and large, the ones who figured this out and changed what they do accordingly. They are covering fewer stories and explaining each one properly. They are treating their readers as people who want to understand things, not just people who want to know things happened.
The attention economy is not dying. It is maturing. And what it rewards now is the same thing that has always separated good journalism from bad: the ability to help people make sense of the world they are living in.
That is not a bad thing for journalism. It is actually an opportunity, if the people making editorial decisions can see it clearly enough to act on it.
It would be easy to frame this as a temporary response to a particularly chaotic news environment, or as something specific to a certain demographic. But the search data and consumption patterns suggest it is more durable than that.
The underlying driver is a change in the information environment that is not going away. When information is scarce, any information has value. When information is abundant, only useful information has value. We have been in the abundant phase for a while now, and people’s behaviour is catching up to that reality.
The news organisations and writers who are growing their audiences right now are, by and large, the ones who figured this out and changed what they do accordingly. They are covering fewer stories and explaining each one properly. They are treating their readers as people who want to understand things, not just people who want to know things happened.
The attention economy is not dying. It is maturing. And what it rewards now is the same thing that has always separated good journalism from bad: the ability to help people make sense of the world they are living in.
That is not a bad thing for journalism. It is actually an opportunity, if the people making editorial decisions can see it clearly enough to act on it.
The next time you notice yourself going deep on a single topic — reading three or four things about it, listening to a podcast, maybe even searching for more — that is not a failure of discipline. That is curiosity working the way it is supposed to.
The publications and writers who earn that curiosity, who meet it with clear thinking and honest explanation rather than just more updates, are the ones building something that lasts. That is the new attention economy. And honestly, it seems like a better one.