Understanding young news audiences at a time of rapid change

Useful study. UK-based.

The "authenticity" thing of podcasters is only meaningful if the podcaster was there. Sometimes that happens, and those are the good ones. There are good protest videos. Not many war videos. Secondary sources are just pundits, of which we have too many. It's easy to be an influencer who covers entertainment - entertainment wants to be watched. It's hard to be an influencer who covers, say, unemployment. It's possible, but you have to go and talk live to people who just got laid off. That's reporting.

It's not the delivery system. It's whether the source goes out and pulls in news. Most don't.

“Whatever a patron desires to get published is advertising; whatever he wants to keep out of the paper is news." - City Editor of a Chicago newspaper, 1918. Look at a news story and ask "did this begin with a press release or a speech?". If so, it's publicity. HN had an article from a few days ago about "CEO says" journalism. It's worse on the political front.

Democracy requires that a sizable fraction of voters know what's really happening. This is a big problem.

Influencers can be controlled. Dubai has cracked down on war reporting by the large number of influencers there.[1] Right now, Iran claims a missile hit on an Oracle data center in Dubai. The UAE denies this. Did anybody in Dubai drive over and take pictures? Call up Oracle and ask? Nah.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/03/dubai-...

A big problem is that the product of "access journalism" is untrustworthy.

In order to produce articles which generate large clickthrough rates for comparatively low cost, news organizations rely on interviews with people in power. But as a price of access, the people in power require a certain level of deference that compromises the news channel in the eyes of young audiences, when there are lots of other competing sources that don't observe the same deference.

Reuters is less guilty of this than the NY Times, but it's a problem that afflicts all traditional news organizations.

I feel like the best advice I could give to young news audiences is to stop. Just stop. What little value the news may offer to make you a more informed citizen is completely outweighed by all the negatives.

Or if you must watch the news, local only.

It is not about sources choices. Young people must read books. Everybody should read books. Books on liberty, like "1984" or authors like Michael Ende. Also books on history (and prehistory). That is the thing that really matters and the only via to avoid echo chambers.

Anecdotally, that literally only one of my college age students knew about the Moon mission was wild.

I genuinely now believe that a real barrier to (the terrible idea of) reinstating the draft is that it would actually be difficult to find and inform the public about it, in a believable way.

>> ... Meeting the needs of this segment is crucial, not just for the current stability of the journalism industry, but also for the future of democratic societies as young individuals transition through adulthood

Sure buddy. Keep telling yourself that.

Mainstream media can't die quick enough.

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“Most people across generations favour the idea of impartial news, but young people more often (32% compared with 19% of those 55+) think it ‘makes no sense for news outlets to be neutral on certain issues’, such as climate change or racism.”

Unfortunately it’s documentarians such as David Attenborough that carefully curate a picture of nature as some playful, curious thing. It would behoove schools that prepare students for post-secondary education to put on actual video recordings of how animals go at it and how the strong kill the weak (and their offspring) in the most savage and cruel of ways with complete disregard. And then ask them if they would rather not know this is how the world really is. Because that’s what taking a side means here, is being wilfully ignorant.