The presidential election, pandemic and racial reckoning were stories that drove intense interest and engagement to news outlets in 2020 in the US. To a large degree, 2021 represented the inevitable hangover.

Various metrics illustrate the dwindling popularity of news content.

Cable news networks were the main form of evening entertainment for millions of Americans last year. In 2021, weekday prime-time viewership dropped 38 percent at CNN, 34 percent at Fox News Channel and 25 percent at MSNBC, according to the measurement research company Nielsen, AP reported from New York on the news consumption trends in the US.

The decline was less steep but still significant at broadcast television evening newscasts: 12 percent at ABC’s “World News Tonight” and the “CBS Evening News”, 14 percent at NBC’s “Nightly News”, Nielsen said.

The Trump era saw explosive subscriber growth for some digital news sites like The New York Times and Washington Post. Yet readers aren’t spending as much time there. Comscore said the number of unique visitors to the Post’s site was down 44 percent in November compared to November 2020, and down 34 percent at the Times.

While a December 23 headline on the Los Angeles Times front page — “How Much More Can We Take?”— referred to COVID-19, it could easily be applied to the news appetite in general.

For the most part, smart news executives knew the peaks of 2020 were not sustainable.

The media monitoring company NewsWhip looked at 14 million political articles online last year and found they had an average of 924 engagements, or social media interactions. The 13.5 million articles NewsWhip has traced in 2021 had an average of 321 engagements.

To a certain extent, these outlets have turned elsewhere for revenue opportunities, an analyst said.. CNN is preparing to debut a new streaming service early next year, and recently poached Fox News’ Chris Wallace to join that effort.

Fox News, while doubling down on conservative commentary following perceived threats from outlets like Newsmax and OANN, directed fans to its Fox Nation streaming service. Arguably Fox’s most attention-getting programming of the year was a documentary on the January 6 Capitol riot by Tucker Carlson, that asserted it was an effort to silence Trump supporters.

Local news outlets saw a boost in digital subscriptions as people sought information in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. While interest in pandemic news has waned, analysts feel the outlets have done well in keeping many of those new subscribers.