If you are reading this, you are in a small minority, so feel special.

This opinion is written in a forum for news that social media began outpacing in 2018, according to Pew Research.

Only 9% of U.S. adults reported getting their news “often” from print newspapers, and only 28% said they read print news “sometimes.” Only 5% of those adults say they preferred getting their news from print sources.

The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report found that a staggering 15% of young U.S. news consumers in the United States say that news writing — which is, quite literally, designed to be the most concise and direct form of writing — is too hard to follow. Only 5% of respondents over 35 said the same.

Interestingly enough, according to the Reuters Institute, the percentage of Americans who say they don’t access news at all from any source has increased from 3% in 2013 to 15% in 2022, meaning the percentage of Americans who avoid news completely is set to outpace print readers.

Yes, this lack of engagement with news will translate to people being less informed about current events and, therefore, their participation in democracy and all that, but hey, what about my future job?

From 2008 to 2020, newsroom employment fell by 26%, according to Pew Research. As readers abandon print mediums, advertisers, where papers got most of their revenue, have followed.

So what does this all mean? Surely, all of this readership must go somewhere — probably online, right?

Unfortunately not. According to Pew, the average visit duration to news websites was 1.74 minutes in 2022, which has decreased from 2019’s 2.13 minutes, and the number of unique visitors to these sites has also steadily declined.

Accessing the news directly through the media’s websites is important because ads those websites host generate revenue for those news sources.

Whenever people engage with news through social media, only large social media companies like TikTok and Meta get the money, which means none for the reporters giving you information.

According to Pew, about a quarter of American adults under 30 regularly get their news from TikTok now, a platform with an algorithm that favors sensationalized snippets of information to promote user engagement.

A 2022 Pew Research study found that 50% of Americans aged 18-29 have “some or a lot of trust” in information from social media; this percentage is dangerously close to the 62% and 56% that reported trust in local and national news outlets, respectively.

This pattern of people relying on social media for information will have serious ramifications for news literacy, which is already quite sad; when Pew presented Americans with five factual and five opinion statements in 2018, only 26% of them were able to identify the facts, and 36% correctly identified the opinion statements.

The news media is anything but perfect — most reporters rely too heavily on official sources and news releases, and 90% of the industry has been consolidated into six large firms, essentially an oligopoly.

For-profit competitors rarely survive independently. Unsuccessful ones often die painful deaths, and mildly successful ones simply die a little slower before AT&T, CBS, Comcast, Disney, Newscorp or Viacom come knocking to swallow them up.

But then again, this opinion is written at a time when nearly a quarter of American adults told Pew they hadn’t read a book in the last 12 months. Maybe all hope is lost for words in general.