When Do People Actually Tune In?
by Ashley Graham-Wilcox
Pew Research Center just published a study on how Americans describe their own changing news habits, and instead of leading with a survey number, they did something more interesting: they sat 45 people down in focus groups, ages 20s through 60s, and just asked them to talk about it. "News" here is doing a lot of lifting — participants meant everything from newspapers and TV to group texts, TikTok, and Apple News alerts. Basically: however you currently find out things. What came back wasn't really about news. It was about attention — how we decide, moment to moment, what's worth tuning in for.
A few things jumped out:
First, people describe the information environment now as inescapable. Not "I check the news" but "the news finds me" — alerts, feeds, group texts, all unsolicited. That tracks with the survey Pew ran alongside the focus groups: half of U.S. adults say they're taking in more news than a decade ago, and almost nobody says less.
And yet, second, most people said the moments they actually go looking for information, on purpose, cluster around life transitions. Starting a new job. Having a baby. Retiring. Sending a kid to college. Not because they suddenly became more curious people, but because the transition itself made certain information relevant in a way it wasn't the week before.
Third: Trust is doing a lot of quiet work underneath all of it.
"The news is not the truth anymore. We don't know who to trust no more," one participant said. No kidding, right? That's not cynicism for its own sake. It's people trying to figure out who is actually talking to them versus who's talking at them, and adjusting who they let in accordingly.
Finally: Some people are just tapping out, deliberately. (Relateable.)
I don't think any of this is unique to “news.” I think it's a pretty accurate description of how people relate to your communications, too.
We tend to plan our comms around our calendar — stewardship season, Advent, the program year kickoff — which makes sense, because that's when we have something to say. But Pew's research is a reminder that the moments people are actually primed to receive information run on a different clock: the new parent trying to figure out childcare, the person who just moved to town, the caregiver with an irregular schedule. Our calendar and their calendar aren't the same.
A few things I'm taking from this, not as a finished strategy but as questions I'm sitting with:
Where are our "life transition" moments, and do we know about them? Not just baptisms and funerals — the quieter ones. A new job, a diagnosis, a kid leaving for college. We won't always know. But when we do, that's a real window, not just a pastoral care checkbox.
Are we adding to the noise, or cutting through it? If "the news finds me, unsolicited" is how people describe their week, another unprompted email from us competes with everyone/thing else doing the same thing. The stuff that gets through is usually the stuff that felt like it was actually for the person receiving it.
Have we earned the benefit of the doubt? The trust erosion Pew describes isn't really about journalism specifically — it's about institutions generally, and churches aren't exempt from that math. Being a reliable, consistent, honest narrator of our own community is worth more than any single well-timed post.
Pew's focus groups here spanned people in their 20s through their 60s, so none of this — the saturation, the trust erosion, the deliberate pullback — is a “younger” or "older generation" story. It shows up across the board.
What I don't want to do is stretch it to cover a question it wasn't asking: how Gen Z and Millennials relate to church specifically, as opposed to information in general.
How Gen Z and Millennials actually decide who and what to trust is a different question, and it's one Caffeinated Church has spent this year digging into with Egg Strategy, the research firm behind our storytelling work. Some of it rhymes with Pew's findings: Both generations are, in the research team's words, deeply skeptical of institutional authority, and the church has a reputation to overcome: one of division, intolerance, particular political stances, and public scandal. But some of it cuts a different way, and one finding in particular stopped me: traditional measures of religion (church attendance, daily prayer, claiming a religious identity) are all declining, but 60–65% of this audience still say they're spiritual or interested in spirituality, and 65–75% say they believe in God or a higher power — including 61% of people who check "none" for religious affiliation.
The decline of the old measuring sticks is masking real, live interest in the thing itself. It's not that this generation stopped looking. It's that they stopped assuming church was where they'd find it.
And then there's this, which might be my favorite finding in the whole report: among people who say they always attend church, only 17% feel lonely or isolated at least once a week, compared to 34% of people who never attend. When it's working, it's really working.
The harder question the research keeps circling back to is a generational one, too: Millennials, by and large, grew up in church and stopped going — they're "deconstructing" and asking "should I leave Christianity?" Gen Z, more often, never had a church home to begin with, and they're not deconstructing anything — they're asking "where do I even start looking?"
We'll be unpacking the fuller findings and what they mean for how we reach this generation specifically at a November 17 workshop. If today's post got you thinking about the people already listening, come hear what we're learning about the people who aren't yet.
