Traditional media are not losing because of format or distribution, but because of what they sell. They built their model on adrenaline, fear and catastrophe. Algorithms on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube sell emotional regulation. In 2026, Czech media began to admit this too.
Snapshot of the front pages of five Czech news websites, Monday 27 April 2026.
Overweight. Skinny. Disgusting. The film is worthless. Lock them up. Murdered. Yesterday, last week, years ago, tortured. Anniversary of violence. Thirty years since the Kuřim case. Old woman. Robbed. Attacked. Raped. Sold daughter to the mafia. Exhaustion. How to hide big breasts. How to show off small breasts. Why we are getting divorced. Children are not property. Cruelty according to horoscope. Won’t be going on holiday. Diarrhoea and constipation. How to lose weight. Unacceptable. Sad testimony. Death on holiday.
Then you open Instagram.
Yoga. Quark cheesecake. New blazer from Reserved. A dog learning to give a paw. Ramen recipe. How to grow tomatoes on a balcony. Quick workout. Music for tomorrow evening.
One feed is adrenaline, the other is dopamine. For some reason we are still surprised which of them the audience is running away from.
Negativity has a price, measurable in percentages
Traditional news sells fear and catastrophe for economic reasons, not because of moral failings among editors. A study published in Nature Human Behaviour analysed 105,000 headline variants from the Upworthy website and 5.7 million clicks. Each additional negative word in a headline increased the click-through rate by 2.3%. Positive words, on the other hand, reduced it.
The thirty-year-old Anglo-Saxon journalistic rule of thumb, if it bleeds, it leads, did not collapse in the digital era. Distribution algorithms reinforced it. Negative content generates higher click-through rates, higher click-through leads to wider distribution, and wider distribution brings more negative content. The loop reinforces itself, and newsrooms cannot escape it until the advertising model changes.
Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025 shows how that loop looks from the audience’s side. According to it, 40% of people worldwide sometimes or often actively avoid the news. In 2017 the figure was 29%.
The reasons are consistent across countries. 39% of people cite a negative impact on their mood and 31% a feeling of being overwhelmed. Thirty percent are bothered by too much conflict, and twenty percent by a sense of powerlessness.
According to the same report, young people are the fastest-growing group of consistent avoiders. They say news is not relevant to their lives, leads to toxic arguments and causes powerlessness. Instead, they open a different app, where they find the calm that the adrenaline of traditional news does not offer.
News consumption in Czechia is falling faster than the global average
The Czech context suggests the problem may be more acute here than the average. The Reuters Institute’s 2025 report on Czechia found that news consumption across all media types is the lowest since 2016. Trust in news stands at 33%. Nine percent of Czechs pay for online news.
Young Czech readers have long been managing their media diet outside traditional sources. According to data from the Czech Council of Children and Youth, young people get information about current events from social media in 81% of cases, from online news in 79%, and from television in only 44%.
An academic analysis of Czech media coverage of the second presidential election in 2017 to 2018 found that the tone of headlines from five leading news websites (Parlamentní listy, Aktuálně, iDnes, Novinky, iHned) reached a value of -0.8 on a scale where zero means neutral. The sample included over a thousand articles, and the tone reached almost maximum negativity in headline communication.
We do not have a sentiment analysis for the current period in Czechia. But there is a clear signal from the other end of the distribution chain, namely the algorithmic admission by an aggregator.
Seznam introduced an algorithm to dampen negative news
On 26 February 2026, Seznam announced that it would begin algorithmically dampening the concentration of negative news on its homepage. The system automatically evaluates the sentiment of articles and limits how many of them can be displayed at the same time. A negative article is replaced by relevant material from culture, sport, technology or lifestyle.
The categories subject to the limit are essentially a list of the traditional clickbait menu. Murders, suicides, violence, serious accidents, natural disasters, epidemics, crises, sexual crimes and drug-related problems.
Seznam product manager Michal Kolář clarified: “Our goal is not to censor negative news in any way. We primarily want to ensure a more balanced reader experience.”
The largest Czech news aggregator is thereby admitting that uncontrolled optimisation for clicks delivers content that makes its audience leave the page. The algorithmic limit is a business decision, not a moral stance. Seznam is introducing it because the audience is starting to leave, and the economics of the advertising model no longer allow it to be ignored.
Seznam itself described the logic in its newsletter from October 2025, in these words: “Bad news simply gets read more, and many newsrooms willingly meet that demand.”
Emotional regulation as an Instagram product
The creator economy took over the audience because of the emotional product the platform offers.
The algorithms of Instagram, TikTok and YouTube are tuned to maximise time spent in the app. A user’s stress leads them to close the app, so the algorithm suppresses stress. In practice, the feed produces content that works as emotional regulation: yoga, recipes, ASMR, lifestyle, a short video with a pet.
Traditional news does not offer such a choice, because its product is made up mostly of fear and anger. For a reader under stress, a news portal tends to amplify that emotion rather than soothe it.
The consequence is visible in the industry’s numbers. In 2025, CNN lost 16% of its total audience and 31% of its key advertising group aged 25 to 54. MSNBC lost 25% in primetime and 30% across the whole broadcast day.
Advertising revenues of American newspapers have fallen by more than 80% since their peak in 2005. Press Gazette counted more than three thousand job cuts in the UK and US alone in 2025.
At the same time, advertising spending in the creator economy is set to reach $37 billion in 2025, according to IAB. It is growing four times faster than the rest of the media industry.
Newsrooms themselves feel the shift. In its predictions for 2026, the Reuters Institute found that 76% of publishers want their staff to behave more like creators. Seventy percent of respondents worry that content creators are taking their audience’s attention. Thirty-nine percent fear losing editorial talent to the creator economy.
Politics on Czech Facebook is the most negative in Central Europe
Assuming that the problem with negativity lies exclusively in traditional news, and that social networks are pure comfort, would be an oversimplification.
A study by the National Institute SYRI, published on 14 October 2024, compared political content on Facebook in five Central European countries during parliamentary elections held between 2020 and 2022. Czechia came out as the most negative, with 52% of political statements being negative. Lithuania, at the other end of the scale, had 17%.
The study’s author, Alena Pospíšil Macková, summed up the reason: “Negative content triggers strong emotional reactions, such as fear or anger, which lead to greater attention.”
The same mechanism that governs the choice of a headline in a newsroom also governs the choice of rhetoric by political parties on Facebook. The algorithm extended their reach. The negativity of Czech political Facebook is an extreme expression of a principle that traditional news helped to create.
What matters, then, is the type of content, not the platform. News and political content is negative across platforms. Lifestyle, wellness and personal content remains structurally less negative across platforms. Traditional media are losing because news dominates their product mix. Instagram and TikTok, by contrast, have most of their mix in lifestyle and entertainment.
Toxic positivity and the commodification of wellness on Instagram
The lifestyle feed on Instagram has its price, which users pay in a currency other than the adrenaline of news.
A study by Diggit Magazine shows that wellness on Instagram is a commercial construct. Self-care there is a transaction, which the user buys as an app subscription, a breathing course, a dietary supplement or a retreat in Bali. The aesthetics of a yoga pose in such a setting and interior work as a product advert, just in a softer form.
The second effect of the feed is so-called toxic positivity, that is, the emotional pressure to appear fine, which leads to suppressing negative feelings. When a user sees only smiles, holidays and smoothies in the feed, they interpret their own anxiety as personal failure instead of a reaction to reality.
On top of this comes a democratic cost. Forty percent of the global population actively avoid the news, and they avoid not only toxicity but also information about the state of society. In such a model, the informed citizen who votes, pays taxes and checks power is a secondary product. The algorithm does not address this.
How AI is changing the economics of traditional news in 2026
According to the Reuters Institute’s predictions, in 2026 the pressure of negativity on audiences and the pressure from creators on advertising budgets are joined by the pressure of generative AI, the most serious strategic risk for the whole sector.
In the report, publishers themselves predict a 40% drop in search referrals over the next three years. Main search traffic, which historically made up a substantial part of their audience, is disappearing in favour of AI answers in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. AI tools draw on media content but no longer send users on to the original page.
The publishers’ response is clear. 91% of them plan to increase investment in investigative journalism and 82% in contextual analysis. In contrast, 38% plan to cut routine news coverage, 42% service journalism and 32% evergreen content, because AI can easily reproduce these formats.
Traditional media are thus facing pressure from two sides at once. The creator economy is taking their attention and advertising budgets from above, while AI tools are taking their search traffic for routine news from below. The space for economically self-sufficient news inside this cage is shrinking.
What constructive journalism is and why it builds reader trust
The most prominent systemic response to this pressure has been developed by the Constructive Institute at Aarhus University in Denmark, founded by journalist Ulrik Haagerup. It defines three pillars of journalism for the new era: solutions (mapping attempts to solve a problem, not just describing it), nuance (rejecting a binary conflict frame) and democratic conversation (restoring space for dialogue instead of viral outrage).
Academic research in this area demonstrates the effect in numbers. According to data from the Constructive Institute, 87% of readers feel a more positive emotion after reading a constructive article than after a classic news text on the same topic. The constructive format increases the perceived credibility of the outlet by 8%. An independent survey by SmithGeiger for the Solutions Journalism Network showed a significant difference in reader trust. In the solutions version of the article, 83% of readers expressed trust, compared with only 55% in the problem-only version.
A study published in the journal Journalism Practice in 2025 adds a methodological framework. Constructive journalism does not try to make the news more pleasant, but more useful. Instead of a bare report on a tragedy, it offers a format in which the event is followed by information on how institutions are responding and how similar problems are being solved elsewhere.
The Constructive Institute runs an annual fellowship, in which around ten journalists from across the world take part each year. Fellows spend five or ten months in Aarhus and, after returning to their newsrooms, have the task of implementing the constructive format. Target newsrooms have included Le Monde, Spiegel, Süddeutsche Zeitung and public broadcasters from Scandinavia. So far, this shift has not gained traction in mainstream Czech-language media.
Deník N, Voxpot, Heroine and Reportér: how subscription models are growing in Czechia
While traditional news websites in Czechia are losing both trust and audiences, the segment of independent subscription media is growing. The models that work here share several features: independence from advertising, an editorial focus on depth instead of the click economy, and a direct relationship with the subscriber.
Deník N closed the first half of 2025 with an EBITDA profit of more than CZK 1 million, according to MediaGuru. The main reason is its growing subscriber base. The premium subscription Klub N has doubled its membership in two years. Deník N exceeded its original target of 25,000 subscribers. Meanwhile, the newsroom has grown to twice its size.
Voxpot, founded by journalists Vojtěch Boháč and Aneta Václavíková, funds its operations primarily through its member-based Voxpot Klub. For subscribers it offers bonus articles, a printed magazine, access to a Discord server and the chance to help decide on topics. Its main product is reporting from countries that traditional Czech media almost never visit. The Caucasus, the Balkans, the Middle East.
Heroine, a society magazine for and about women, generates revenue of around CZK 15 million on the Czech market, according to Médiář, and expects CZK 17 million in 2026. Most of its turnover still comes from the print edition. It has just over 1,000 web subscribers, with a target of 2,500 to 3,000. At that point, the publisher would be able to do without advertising. This year, the publisher of Slovak Denník N also entered Heroine.
Reportér today has 11,000 people prepaying CZK 990 a year. Investigative journalism, in-depth interviews and long-form reporting in ten issues a year. No clickbait headline about a sad testimony, but a long text about what is really happening and why.
The common feature of these four titles is simple. Their audiences pay for content that you will not find free on a news portal, namely depth, context and editorial discipline instead of clicks.
Janek Rubeš and CzechCrunch: who is taking the audience from Czech media
The second group taking audiences away from traditional media is domestic creators. Czech news media are losing attention not only to foreign platforms, but also to specific people who publish under their own brand.
Janek Rubeš, together with cameraman Honza Mikulka, has built the YouTube channel Honest Guide to 1.84 million subscribers and 265 million views, according to public data. Videos about Prague’s pitfalls for tourists have gradually turned into reporting on the city, transport, scams, culture and politics. According to Forbes Česko, YouTube income for the period July 2024 to June 2025 reached CZK 22 million, which placed Rubeš and his colleague among the six best-paid Czech YouTubers.
The Czech podcast market has reached more than one million weekly listeners, according to Spotify data. CzechCrunch runs a range of its own shows focused on business, technology, culture and politics: Money Maker, Crunch with Čestmír Strakatý, Město. Forbes Česko produces its own podcast series covering economics and investment. Vinohradská 12 Českého rozhlasu shows that even a public broadcaster can handle a creator-style format, if it is given space and trust.
These formats differ from classic news in three ways. Show length ranges from a single story to thirty minutes. Depth addresses the question “why” rather than “who”. And the voice belongs to a specific host, not to a neutral editorial “we”. This is exactly the direction that the Reuters Institute predicts for the future of the publishing sector.
What the role of traditional media will be in 2026
From the cases described above, four possible paths follow for how traditional media can respond. Seznam showed with its February algorithm the path of dampening negativity at the level of distribution. The Constructive Institute shows a second option, dampening it already at the level of production. The creator economy shows a third, in which a newsroom gives up the news product entirely and focuses on what the audience wants. Czech subscription titles show a fourth: building a business model on depth and trust instead of clicks.
Each of these paths has a cost. Algorithmic dampening of distribution requires editors to hand part of their editorial autonomy over to the algorithm. Constructive journalism in production means rewriting a whole decade of learned routines. A consistent focus on what the audience wants means giving up the watchdog role. The subscription model works, but it grows slowly and requires editorial discipline that mass media have lost during years of the click economy.
Probably no across-the-board reform will arrive next year. Instead, the publishing field will split into two parts. Traditional media will try to keep their information monopoly with the constructive format, deeper investigations and their own creator-style broadcasting. The creator economy will grow at roughly four times the rate of the rest of the industry. The range of activities that classic newsrooms cover today will narrow in this model.
Traditional media have already lost the battle for attention. The question is what their role will be once they stop being the primary destination for audiences. This is a less dramatic ending than the collapse discussed in recent years, but it is the end of a specific business model that audiences paid for for years with adrenaline. Audiences are now choosing a different type of content. Traditional media have until 2027 to decide whether to offer them an alternative, or whether creators, constructive journalists and subscription publishers will permanently take over their role.
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