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The news industry is withering away. You know that. I know that. We worry, talk and write about it a lot. Between 2014 and 2024 global newspaper revenues declined by 29 per cent and although some studies indicate modest growth over the next five years, the future of news is being called into question.

Cocooned in info-bubbles, audiences, especially younger ones, are deserting news media and traditional platforms in their droves, disappearing into a black hole of proliferating disinformation-saturated social media and chatbot nets. We forensically analyse the reasons and unmet needs that drive audiences’ avoidance of news and seek remedies that include more positive news angles, anchored in offering solutions, more explainers and more audience-relevant news on as many platforms as resources allow.

All these lenses logically assessing audience (dis)engagement are important, but they fail to include arguably the most important element that lies at the core of human engagement – emotions. Engagement is attention and the emotions we feel galvanise that attention or don’t.

Despite the stratospheric speed at which humanity adopts cutting-edge technologies, we are remarkably slow at applying the revolutionary discoveries related to emotions that neuroscience has gifted us in the last few decades. Instead, we remain stuck in old thinking patterns that rest on the archaic belief that reason is superior to emotion, that reason must be in control for sound decisions, manifested in facts, to be made, while emotions are merely primal impulses that must be subjugated.

Scientific explanations this century have revealed that reason and emotions operate as a fully integrated decision-making system and emotions enable the discernment that reason relies upon It is in fact emotions that assign value to facts, deeming them good or bad, significant or not. "You might think that in everyday life, the things you see and hear influence what you feel, but it’s mostly the other way around," says Lisa Feldman Barrett in her highly acclaimed How Emotions are Made.

The news industry is lagging significantly behind in understanding the integral role that emotions play in people’s decisions of whether or not to engage with the news, despite some of the best journalists grasping this concept, like The New York Times’ opinion columnist David Brooks who argues that we are only as smart as our emotions.