News engagement fell off a cliff in 2021

A lot of this content isn’t “News”

It’s The News™

Which are often thinly veiled opinion pieces, rage bait or political hit jobs with anonymous “sources”

Yea right...streaming is not the reason people are less engaged in "news"

It's not clear if they are including traditional metropolitan print newspapers. Maybe under web sites?

That's my read under "Website visits for the top-performing news websites" and the subsequent note distinguishing hyper-partisan sites (large drop in attention) with mainstream news entities.

On balance I'd argue that this is a good thing, on two bases:

1. The level of attention was clearly toxic.

2. If outrage and clickbait are losing their power, mainstream news can return to more substantive and significant coverage, rather than sensation and trend-following.

Or so I hope. I'm often wrong in my optimistic (and occasionally, pessimistic) forecasts.