From Singapore: there is a category of content that newspaper editors rarely discuss in public but quietly treasure in their analytics dashboards. Horoscope columns, dismissed by critics as unscientific entertainment, consistently rank among the most-read pages on major Australian news websites. The Sydney Morning Herald's weekly astrology forecasts, penned by Hedy Damari, are a case in point.
The commercial logic is not complicated. Astrology columns cost relatively little to produce, attract a loyal readership that returns on a predictable weekly or daily cycle, and generate strong social sharing among readers who forward their star sign's forecast to friends. For a media industry that has spent two decades searching for sustainable digital revenue, reliable repeat traffic is genuinely valuable, whatever one thinks of the content itself.
The more interesting question is why tens of millions of people worldwide continue to read horoscopes in an era saturated with data, scientific communication, and evidence-based advice. The answer, according to researchers who study the psychology of belief, has less to do with gullibility and more to do with how humans manage anxiety.
Studies published through institutions including the Australian Psychological Society and its international counterparts have long documented what is sometimes called the Barnum effect: the tendency for people to accept vague, generally positive personality descriptions as uniquely applicable to themselves. Horoscope language is expertly crafted to trigger this response. Phrases like "your relationship sector is activated" or "career decisions require careful thought" are broad enough to resonate with almost anyone reading them at almost any point in their lives.
That is not a cynical observation. Psychologists note that the ritual of reading a horoscope, and the brief reflective pause it encourages, can have genuine wellbeing value independent of any predictive accuracy. The column functions less as a forecast and more as a prompt for self-examination, a structured moment of reflection in an otherwise chaotic news feed.
The sceptical counterpoint is worth taking seriously. Journalism operates under a public-interest obligation that entertainment does not share. When a masthead with the institutional weight of the Sydney Morning Herald publishes astrological advice alongside its news coverage, it lends a degree of implied credibility to claims that have no scientific basis. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has in the past scrutinised psychic and astrology services that charge fees for personalised readings, finding some to be misleading. A free newspaper column occupies different legal territory, but the broader question of editorial responsibility is not trivial.
There is also a resource argument. The editorial hours devoted to commissioning, editing, and publishing astrology content are hours not spent on investigative reporting, policy analysis, or the kind of public-interest journalism that justifies a free press's privileged place in a democracy. Newsrooms facing severe staffing cuts across Australia, documented extensively by the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne, can ill afford to treat any editorial resource as trivially allocated.
Set against this, the commercial realities of independent digital publishing are unforgiving. Traffic that keeps a website financially viable enables the investigative and public-interest work that critics rightly prize. The Sydney Morning Herald is not choosing between astrology and a royal commission investigation; it is choosing between astrology and a blank space in the Sunday Life supplement that generates no revenue and attracts no readers.
The honest conclusion is that astrology columns in mainstream newspapers represent a genuine tension between editorial idealism and commercial pragmatism, and that reasonable people land in different places on that tension. What the data shows clearly is that readers vote with their clicks, and they have been voting for horoscopes for as long as newspapers have existed. Understanding why, rather than simply dismissing the fact, is probably the more productive exercise for anyone who cares about where journalism goes next.