The Neuroscience of Journalism

By Sheeva Azma

Is there a way to optimize newsgathering and consumption to best suit the human mind?

What happens to your brain when you read news? What can be said of the brains of journalists who report on the world’s happenings? Is there a way to optimize news reporting for the people who read it?

Recently, I talked to journalists Allen Arthur of Solutions Journalism Network and Kristine Villanueva about this topic. You can see our conversation here. Allen and Kristine have thought a lot about the brain on news, and have presented about the neuroscience of journalism at two conferences for journalists.

I asked Allen and Kristine, who are both journalists working in the audience engagement space: since journalists use their brains on a daily basis, why aren’t more journalists learning about how their own brains work? Same with the people who read news: the journalism audience. Do they ever think about the effect of the news on their brains?

Allen says that these conversations are not happening on any large scale. He and Kristine are leading the way on this subject. 

Allen and Kristine are, apparently, unique in the field of journalism for thinking about the effect of news on our brains. He tells me that many stories that elicit fear and anxiety involve our amygdalas, the fear and anxiety center of our brains. When our amygdalas are fired up, our fight-or-flight response kicks in. As a result, acting in our own self-interests and in “survival mode,” we become less trusting. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that people are less engaged with the news than they used to be, according to the Pew Research Foundation.

As a result, Allen wonders, is the news landscape making us less trusting? Same with Kristine. Since journalism solves hard problems, doesn’t the current news landscape, driving away readers, become the antithesis of the thing that journalists set out to do?

As a neuroscientist, I am very interested in this conversation, and wish it was happening more. Maybe I have a unique perspective because I used to be a PTSD researcher (and still am, for the time being), but the level of trauma in news reporting is alarmingly high for it to go completely unnoticed. 

I am heartened by the new concept of “trauma-informed reporting,” which seeks to understand the trauma of people who are the subject of news stories, as well as the trauma of journalists working with content that may be at the edges of humanity, like war reporting. There’s also the traumatization of readers, which gets shockingly little attention, based on the broadcast TV coverage I avoid every day because it is way too violent. I often wonder as I watch the news: who vets these things?

If I had to guess, the answer is that nobody vets the news for its potential “traumatization level.” 

After my conversation with Kristine and Allen, I wondered – what actually is out there about the neuroscience of journalism? 

Though I can attest that my fellow cognitive neuroscientists and I love to keep up with the news, they do not study it in the same way that they study abstract things like cognition, emotion, motivation, and so on in the lab. Studies on the neuroscience of journalism – both from the journalist’s and reader’s perspective – are rare. As a neuroscientist who has studied the brain on traumatic stress and addiction, I can make some hypotheses. For example, clickbait stories, those news stories that grab your attention and garner a click in hope of something exciting, could involve the dopamine or “reward” system. On the other hand, doomscrolling, which gives us the feeling of being informed without really informing, keeps us alert and ready to scroll more by both feeling rewarding (our brains think, “hey, more information!”) and engaging our fight-or-flight response, which includes the amygdala.

Are these hypotheses borne out by the scientific literature?

Perhaps nobody knows, because there are very few studies specifically investigating the neuroscience of journalism. After my conversation with Allen and Kristine, I went to Google Scholar and searched for studies investigating our brains on journalism, especially the newer digital media journalism that predominates today. I found less than a dozen studies – ever – written on, or sometimes just briefly mentioning, the subject of journalism. 

If you want to read a recap of my unsatisfyingly scarce literature search on the neuroscience of news and journalism, keep reading. My list has two parts: the neuroscience of consuming journalism and the neuroscience of producing journalism, respectively.

Neuroscience of news consumption

• In one study of doomscrolling in COVID-19 news, exposure to COVID-19 news was linked to greater depression and anxiety, more stress about COVID, and greater use of drugs to cope. “Findings suggest that individuals should balance the need to remain informed about the pandemic and their own mental health when considering how much COVID news to consume,” the authors write in the abstract.
• A study of clickbait using electroencephalography found that clickbait headlines have a neural signature consistent with the processing of novelty. Specifically, clickbait headlines evoked the EEG waveforms N2b and P3a, both associated with novelty and thought to be localized to the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which is involved in decision-making, emotion, and cognition. These findings seem borne out in a study that used AI to predict the clickbait factor of headlines that relies upon a neural network model of attention rooted in human language processing which outperforms other AI clickbait classifiers.
• Researchers in behavioral science suggest that clickbait’s allure stems from curiosity stemming from both urge and interest; both can have varying levels. There can be interest to click on clickbait, but no urge. There can also be an urge to click on clickbait, but no interest.
• Bad news increases stress reactivity in women more than men, according to a 2012 study. The study also reported that women were more likely to remember bad news than men were.

Studies about the neuroscience of news reporting and journalism

• Stephen Jukes at Goldsmiths University in London wrote a whole thesis on what he calls “affective journalism” – “the affective processes, behaviours and practices that lie at the heart of journalists’ work when covering traumatic news stories.” Affect is rooted in neuroscience, Jukes states. He quotes several journalists covering wartime news stories, who state that they have to work to actively distance themselves from the traumas that are occurring. Though the thesis doesn’t get into the details of the neurobiology of trauma processing, it’s an interesting perspective into traumatic news stories.
• I found a handful of studies that specifically looked at PTSD in journalists, and especially war journalists. One 2005 study noted that studies of PTSD in journalists were few and far between and hypothesized that journalists’ temperament plays a role in the development of PTSD. I was surprised to read a 2002 study that said PTSD rates in war journalists are similar to those of combat veterans, and that war journalists’ major depression rates are higher than the general population. A 2023 study of journalist PTSD in East Africa stated that trauma visuals play a significant role in escalation of traumatic symptoms and PTSD.

This is your brain – and the world – on digital media

Perhaps some of the problem is that digital media such as social media, blogs, and the internet have not been around long enough to study. For example, “clickbait” and “doomscrolling” were not concepts until the advent of the internet…which changed journalism and the way we digest information completely. 

In 2008, I saw Tom Brokaw speak at MIT and asked him about the role of digital media. He joked that journalists wished it would go away, since things like Tweets by people experiencing a news event were sometimes pre-empting and even eclipsing mainstream journalism coverage. “We’d like the internet to go away, so we can go back to be a monopoly again,” he joked, to laughs from the audience. 

After the laughter had subsided, he continued. “Listen, it’s just hard for me, and for most of us who grew up on traditional media, and I think, even for new users of it, to understand the impact of it and where it’s going. It’s limitless, in my judgment, and we’re racing as fast as we can to try and keep pace with the changes that are going on,” Brokaw replied. “Where does this stuff come from, how useful is it, and can we trust it?” 

Obviously, those questions are still relevant, and perhaps our brains’ information processing mechanisms are more important in figuring it all out than ever. 

Jack Fuller is a publisher who witnessed the way that digital media changed newsgathering. Fuller worked in the Gerald Ford presidential administration and served as editor, publisher, and later, president of the Tribune Publishing Company, a media conglomerate that split into two companies in 2014. In 2010, he wrote an article entitled “What is happening to news?” in which he talks about the role of attention in journalism. “We live…in an era of ‘continuous, partial attention.’ Neuroscience can help explain how [attentional mechanisms] drive such audience behavior as attraction to the latest at the expense of the most important and the apparent appetite for emotionally hot presentation of information– through infotainment and shrill commentary, for example.”

Is it weird that we watch hours of news each day and read it on our smart devices, but we don’t spend nearly as much time, if any, thinking about how it affects our brains and/or the brains of journalists? Chime in below in the comments.