2024 will be a big election year, in the United States and elsewhere. Many news publishers will see an uptick in audience attention, perhaps even advertising, and a few upmarket titles will do a brisk business with discounted trial subscriptions.

I fear that some will mistake this cyclical bump for a structural turning point. It won’t be, and we shouldn’t.

Even in the most privileged parts of the world, journalism as a profession and news as a business face plenty of internal and external changes, ranging from fundamental internal disagreements over principles to external political attacks to a constantly evolving platform environment.

But the most fundamental problem is that much of the public does not find news particularly worthwhile, and accordingly engage with it less and less.

It’s not because they can’t. Sure, some upmarket titles now operate pretty tight pay models. But people in the U.S. can still access online news from ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, NBC, NPR, and many others for free. In the U.K., they can rely on the BBC, Channel 4, The Guardian, ITV, the Mail, Sky, and more. That’s without considering all the newsletters, podcasts, and social posts that are outside various paywalls, the important nonprofit offerings, and various aggregators and portals. When internet users do not engage with news, it is not because they can’t engage with it. It is because they do not find it worth their while.

However gratifying, no amount of speechifying about how journalism serves the public interest will save the profession and the business if the public isn’t interested. Journalism exists in the context of its audience. Some of it has intrinsic value. But it can still only serve its full purpose when it connects with the people it aims and claims to serve. And you serve the public you have, not the public you want.

The risk is that the cyclical bump in attention around various elections will not only obfuscate the more basic structural trend of declining public engagement with news, but also incentivize forms of news production that may in fact exacerbate the more fundamental decline in engagement.

Stories about Trump’s inevitable outrageous antics will do well, as will the usual diet of horserace coverage, “behind the scenes” features, and punditry. But they will do well with the small minority of people who value political-journalism-as-usual. For many others, chancing upon a news site, this stuff will be a reminder of why they don’t visit more often.

Much of political journalism is the Beavis and Butthead of news — loved by a narrow and peculiar target audience, incomprehensible and off-putting to most other people.

Internal analytics will capture the bump in attention — incremental changes in pageviews, engaged time, conversions driven by current audiences. But they risk obfuscating the structural trend of declining engagement, because they provide no information about everybody else. (We should never forget that the audience of most news sites is smaller, weirder, and less representative of the general public than even the topsy-turvy world of what used to be called Twitter.)

I cannot stress enough how clear the structural trends are, and how fundamentally they will change journalism from serving the broad public to serving, basically, people like me who are affluent, highly educated, privileged, and middle-aged or older.

News use is just a few percent of the time people spend using digital media (lower than news as a percentage of print and television use). Almost every part of what news media offer has been unbundled, and, at least at the local level, there are few topics where people see news as the best source of information. Even among the minority who regularly read their local newspapers in print or online, only a small fraction say they would miss them a lot if they went out of business. Interest in news is declining. Both selective and consistent news avoidance is growing. Much of the public does not feel that the news does a good job of helping them understand what is going on in the world, and less than half think that news media monitor and scrutinize powerful people and businesses. Do I need to go on?

So the most fundamental problem facing journalism is that much of the public does not see the value of what the profession and the industry has to offer, and an election year bump will not dispel this existential challenge. Nor will more of the same, stirring invocations of journalisms’ democratic role, or raging against external challenges. Pointing this out is not blaming the victim (the victim here will be the public, not what is still a billion-dollar industry and a white collar profession with above-median salaries).

If journalism and industry leaders do not recognize this and find ways to address it, I predict the most likely outcome is that much of the news media will retreat to the role it played for large parts of its history, sustaining themselves by serving small commercial and political elite audiences, but playing no meaningful democratic role at the level of mass politics. It could end up akin to classical music, contemporary art, and literary fiction — important for a few in the upper crust, marginal to the lives of the majority of the public.

“From news for the few and the powerful, to news for all the people.” That is how Juan González and Joseph Torres describe what they call the historical “grand arc of the American press.” The direction of travel has already changed, and if news media mistake the 2024 cyclical bump for a structural change, and lean into offering even more of what the few and the powerful will engage with, they will be pushing that arc even further in the opposite direction.