In Brief: The Risks of ‘Alert Fatigue;’ the Pressure to Work Late

Most people don’t receive news alerts on their mobile phones, in many cases because they grew tired of the alarms bothering them all day, research suggests. 

As The Guardian reports, news publishers risk losing readers to “alert fatigue,” as users disable news notifications or delete news apps altogether.

Some users receive up to 50 news alerts a day, according to an analysis by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Through aggregators such as Apple News and Google, some mobile users receive multiple alerts about the same story.

In the study, 79% of people surveyed said they do not receive any news alerts during an average week. But among those who don’t receive news alerts, 43% said they had disabled the notifications after receiving too many alerts or not finding them useful.

News organizations are walking a delicate line between notifying users about crucial information and causing readers to unsubscribe by sending them too many updates, the researchers found.

Employees Increasingly Pressured to Work Later in Evening 

More people are working evenings to deal with emails, meetings and other tasks, The Wall Street Journal reports. 

According to data from Microsoft, meetings that occur after 8 p.m. are up by 16%, and many employees check emails later in the evening, often across time zones. 

People got into the habit of working all hours during the pandemic. Though fewer employees now work from home full-time, nearly a third were back on their work email after pausing for dinner or home duties, says the data on the activity of millions of workers who use Microsoft’s business applications. 

Pressure to work long hours is rising as companies slow hiring, trim costs and add tasks to roles. On job-review site Glassdoor, employee mentions of burnout jumped 32% in the first quarter from a year earlier.

Amid a cooling white-collar job market, 63% of employees in a Gallup survey last summer said they’d been asked to assume additional responsibilities, up from 47% in early 2023.

What Do Americans Consider News?

As people receive information from more sources and distinctions blur between news, opinions and entertainment, defining news has become a personal experience for many Americans, a Pew-Knight study finds. 

Most people surveyed agree that information must be factual, up to date and important to society to be considered news. Indeed, 72% of respondents said that being important to society is a major factor in what defines news. People also want information that interests them, is relevant to them or affects their personal lives. 

In the study, Americans make clear distinctions between “hard news” and “soft news.” Hard-news stories about politics and war are still what most people consider news. 

Soft news, on the other hand, refers to entertainment-oriented topics such as celebrity, sports, culture and human-interest stories.

The study’s participants widely agreed that they want news to be “just the facts,” not opinions or commentary. Still, 55% of survey respondents believe it’s at least somewhat important that their news sources share their own political views — even as they say news should not be biased.

Abusive Bosses Think They’re Achieving Something, Study Finds

Many bosses abuse employees to make those workers follow orders or to show them who’s in charge, a new study finds. 

The research from the University of Georgia Terry College of Business was partly inspired by the reality-TV show “Hell’s Kitchen,” in which British chef Gordon Ramsay yells at underlings for 45 minutes for entire episodes.

“I think we assumed that if managers engage in these behaviors, they’d feel bad, and it would always have a negative effect on them,” says Szu-Han (Joanna) Lin, a management professor at the school. “But that’s not the case.”

When supervisors were burned out and yelled at employees, they felt guilty afterwards. But when bosses abused employees to get those workers to perform or to reinforce their leadership role, the supervisors felt better afterwards, as if they’d accomplished something.

“If you engage in abusive behaviors, it will always lead to negative outcomes,” Lin said. “No one will be motivated at all.”