We once believed in utopian dreams about how a digital world would challenge power structures, democratise information and put power into the hands of the audience. Twenty years ago, I even wrote a university dissertation on how the internet was going to re-democratise society.
Two decades on, power structures have certainly been disrupted, but that utopianism has now crashed into a different reality: a growing and largely unrecognised crisis of the "unnewsed" population.
The idea of the unnewsed stems from the concept of the "unbanked", people who are dispossessed of the structures of society that depend on having a bank account. Not having news does the same for you in a democratic system.
It is a global problem. In parts of the developing world the digital divide is defined by the cost of data, often splitting between rural and urban, and in some places male control of mobile phones exacerbates the disenfranchisement of women.
Even in the affluent west, where data is cheap and there are more sim cards than people, that digital divide exists. In the US the concept of "news deserts", communities with no daily local news outlet, is well established. Last week, the Reuters Digital News Report, an annual survey of the digital news habits of 75,000 people in 38 countries, reported that 32 per cent now actively avoid the news - avoidance is up 6.0 percentage points overall and 11 points in the UK.
When I dug into other data on news consumption, from the UK communications regulator Ofcom, I found that those who claim not to follow any news are younger, less educated, have lower incomes and are less likely to be in work than those who do. We don't like to talk about it, but news habits are closely aligned to something that looks very like class.
How people get their news explains some of this - and demonstrates the class divide in access to information. Research by Oxford university's Reuters Institute last year found that there is greater social inequality in news consumption online than offline. Whereas on average we all use the same number of news sources offline, those on the lower end of the socio-economic scale use significantly fewer sources online.
Even the popular tabloids, with their tradition of campaigning news for mass audiences, now have higher social class readers online than in print. Instead of democratising information, there is a risk that the digital revolution is exacerbating gaps in news habits.
However, the concept of the unnewsed is complicated. Before the internet, news habits were relatively straightforward: defined by watching or listening to a TV or radio bulletin, or buying a newspaper. Now that people consume information in timelines, they don't necessarily recognise whether the undifferentiated stream of Facebook pages, tweets and Instagram posts is - or isn't - news.
At the heart of this is the question of how people navigate their news habits. People higher on the socio-economic scale are more likely to go directly to a website or app, and have a direct relationship with a trusted news brand, the Reuters Institute found. News organisations with those readerships can top up advertising revenue with paywalls and reader revenues, creating a self-reinforcing divide in access to journalism. Those lower on the scale rely on social media and the news filtering through, one way or another.
Innovators trying to engage with the unnewsed in different ways - such as BuzzFeed, HuffPost, where I was a senior editor, and Vice - are increasingly struggling to make free journalism satisfy their investors' appetites, so are forced to make cuts and scratch around for new sources of revenue. Meanwhile, public broadcasters are distracted by the fight for younger audiences, who are flocking to streaming services such as Netflix.
There have always been people who were unnewsed, but now they no longer live in an information vacuum. Instead, these citizens still consume information and share opinions, but based on sources that are not produced with the rigour and standards of traditional journalism.
Poor information for poor people; richer sources for the rest. This digital divide has serious ramifications for every element of our democracy and society.
The writer is a visiting fellow at Oxford university's Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and former editor-in-chief of HuffPost UK
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