What to Do When Nobody’s Reading Anything

Reporters and public relations people seldom listen to each other, but if they did, they’d discover they share a common problem.

Most reporters don’t read what PR people send. Most PR people don’t read what reporters write, sending irrelevant story pitches. And more and more people don’t read what the news media publishes.

Corporate internal communications teams are ensnared in the same trap, frustrated when employees skip information no matter how important, and then complain they “never got the email.”   

The problem goes beyond journalism, PR and internal comms, as The Atlantic demonstrates in an 8,600-word cover story, “The end of reading is here.” (Free link.)

“Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to,” writes Staff Writer Rose Horowitch. More people placed a bet last year than read a book.

Corporate communicators should take some comfort in knowing that they aren’t alone in the struggle to get audiences to read. We may be confronted with a social and cultural change that began a century ago and only recently gained momentum.

Yet rather than throwing up our hands, this is an opportunity to redouble our efforts to connect with our audiences. We have four reminders for corporate communicators about what to do if nobody is reading anything.

The irony
 Horowitch traces the history of reading while painting a grim picture of the present using a large palette of statistics.

“The decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels,” she writes. “Even the demographics that traditionally read the most—retirees, women, and college graduates—have seen a collapse.”

Making matters worse, as reading declines so does something else.

“The less you read, the more difficult it is to read, and the rockier the path to acquiring knowledge,” she writes.

The decline is a paradox.

“Strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before,” Horowitch writes. “What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions.”

Journalists are drowning in story pitches. This year, 43% of journalists said they receive at least six story pitches a day, according to a survey by media monitoring company Muck Rack. That’s about the same as 2025, when 42% got that many pitches.

Amid the flood, good story ideas get missed.  Nearly half of journalists say relevant pitches are rare, a sign that public relations people aren’t reading the work of the reporters they are pitching. More than half say they rarely or never respond.

Workers are also inundated. In 2025, employees received on average 14 “broadcast” emails (sent to large groups), up from 13 in 2024, according to PoliteMail’s 2026 Internal Email Communications Benchmark Report. Only 66% of recipients open the email, and of those, 42% actually read them.

“In every audit we do, employees put up their hands in surrender,” my colleague Jim Ylisela wrote last year. “‘Too much,’” they tell us. “‘We can’t get through it all.’ Many turn away from stories that may interest them because they are simply too exhausted to try.”

“This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information,” Horowitch writes.

Microsoft comes to the same conclusion, citing employees’ repeated interruptions by emails, Teams messages and meetings.

“Focus time is a mirage,” the tech giant says, based on data from its 2025 Work Trend Index Annual Report.

With that background, here’s what communicators should remember at a time when reading declines.

1. Send fewer messages. Establish editorial guidelines that set the criteria for a good story and the appropriate channels to distribute each story. Make your intranet the town square of the workplace where employees want to go. Pull them in. Stop pushing out so much information.

2. Make things interesting. A lot of emphasis is placed on making copy clear and concise. Fair enough, but let’s add another “c”: Creative.

In workshops, we often challenge communicators by asking, “Are you bored by your own content?”

Many admit they are. If you’re bored, your audience will be bored too.

3. The oral tradition. If employees don’t read, talk to them. Employees often say their manager is their favorite source of company information. Yet managers face many barriers to effectively communicating with employees.

Communicators know this. Nearly 90% of communicators say that managers’ lack of skills and capacity is a moderate or significant risk to achieving comms objectives, according to the “Employee Communications Report 2026,” by the consulting arm of insurance broker Gallagher.

But communicators often do a poor job of supporting managers.

“An investment in raising managers’ skills on your communications channels strengthens the work environment,” affiliate consultant Denesha Tellis has written.

4. Visual storytelling. As social media’s influence grows, the stage is set for a shift toward telling stories with pictures and graphics. Infographics have seemingly been “the next big thing” every decade since the early 1980s, when Edward Tufte published the ground-breaking, “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.”

“Many people ― including corporate communications pros ― saw the pretty pictures and thought it would, indeed, be easy,” design consultant Bob Zeni tells me.

It’s not as easy as it may look.

“Those who had the skill, time and resources could use the infographic to connect with their audience,” he says. “Few did.”

Now, “for an audience with 10-second attention spans, teams should create very simple, straightforward ones – line graphs or bar charts,” Zeni says.

Hand-wringing?
Horowitch is an unlikely messenger of this warning. She started first grade about the same time the iPhone was introduced in 2007 and got one in seventh grade. She grew up in a family of readers.

“I’m not quite sure when — the habit slipped,” she writes. “I became busier. I started scrolling on my phone before bed instead of reading.” 

She acknowledges that in 1900, an Atlantic essay sounded the alarm about “one of the most serious of the unchallenged changes of modern American life.”

The threat? The newspaper.

“Perhaps, 126 years from now, this essay will seem like the latest such exercise in hand-wringing,” she admits.

She doesn’t think so.

Tom Corfman, a senior consultant with Ragan Consulting Group, is reading, “The British Are Coming,” by Rick Atkinson, the first of a planned trilogy of books on the American Revolutionary War. Are your audiences reading what you want them to? It might be time for a communications assessment. Email Tom to set up a free call with him and RCG co-founder and senior partner Jim Ylisela.

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