On Building and Engaging Younger Audiences
The verdict is in: young people consume only the news they have to, and without much joy. Not only that, but the habits by which young people are consuming news are extremely different than they were 20 years ago—a staggering 74 percent of Gen Z and Millennials combined get most or all of their news from web-based resources. A very large piece of that is via social media—TikTok in particular has seen a 500 percent growth in being a trusted news source since just 2019. However, young people’s trust in the news is at its lowest in a century. Only 17 percent of Gen Z and Millennials actually trust the news they are consuming.
This presents a problem for established brands because young people simply do not trust them. Building and engaging young people means breaking down a barrier of distrust and catering to them in ways that they are going to be able to engage with the news. These are two challenges most major newsrooms have not faced to this magnitude in their history.
So where can one start?
DIVIDE AND CONQUER
The first thing to do, according to regional Swedish news publisher NWT, is to break up younger readers by age bracket and subject matter. They split their audiences into “18-to-29-year-olds who were found to favor reading about entertainment, relationship and touching stories, careers and breaking news. 30-to-45-year-olds were interested in stories about society and investigative journalism, real estate, new stores and restaurants, and kids and family life.”
"We almost immediately started producing both journalism and marketing activities totally focused on the challenge statement and the new knowledge we had around these target groups. We could instantly see the results with early wins and reaching the set goals," says Patric Hamsch, deputy head of media. In general, the newspaper saw a growth of about 10 percent for 18-39 year olds.
HIRE WORKING PROFESSIONALS WHO OCCUPY THESE AGE GROUPS
One of the biggest issues that has plagued the United States in recent years is a rise in income inequality, meaning that some Americans are unable to retire from the workforce at all. While that presents a difficult social challenge on one end of the spectrum, content created by 65+ year old editors and journalists is far less likely to engage younger audiences. However, hiring young working professionals to create and curate content aimed at their own age group is a very simple recipe for success.
“It just means thinking of your audience as an active part of your reporting process and taking that equally seriously as we do our sourcing and visuals. Because sometimes the greatest stories come from that,” said Ethar El-Katatney, a news product strategist at Bloomberg, who targets Gen Z. El Katatney also stresses the importance of “social listening,” namely reaching out to peer groups within her demographic to find out which news stories they are craving to see more coverage on.
“It’s really on us [journalists] to be ‘with the times,’ and for you to make an effort to go to your audience,” she cautioned. “It doesn’t matter if you [win] a Pulitzer Prize if your younger [readers] — the people who will be the managers and everything in five to 10 years — aren’t the ones connecting with you. You’ll be obsolete in a few years.”
CREATE CONTENT YOUNGER PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO AVOID
Hostility around major news stories is a serious issue that is causing more and more younger readers to completely avoid the news or avoid engaging with the news whatsoever. COVID-19 made this worse: several consumers reported creating active limits on how much news they consumed or how much time they spent engaging with prescient topics during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic, and again in the following year when vaccines became available.
“Depending on my mood, if I see news that I know is bad, is going to upset me, sometimes I leave it and read it later,” said an anonymous 24 year old man from Brazil to the Reuters’ Institute.
But young people are not ignoring all news—studies show that 18-40-year olds in the U.S. have been avoiding articles about politics and about COVID-19 specifically. “Our qualitative research suggests that, among these groups, perceptions of political news are intrinsically tied to other themes of news avoidance: beliefs that it is particularly negative, that there is nothing they can do with the information, or that it is less trustworthy than other forms of news,” said a report by the Reuters’ Institute. “Rather than simply avoiding news, there is ‘news to be avoided.’”
This creates an opportunity for journalists and newsrooms alike to diversify their content rather than reporting on the biggest hot-button issues. And studies also show that what young people perceive as “news” has grown broader in recent years: under 35s are more likely to be interested in ‘softer’ news topics: entertainment and celebrity news (33 percent interested), culture and arts news (37 percent), and education news (34 percent),” per the Reuters Institute. Some other topics that fit under “soft” news include sports, celebrity gossip, food and drink, and science.
There is no denying the media landscape is the most challenging it’s been in anybody's memory. Newsrooms and individual journalists must rise to the occasion to engage a growing and changing world's (and generation’s) perception of what is worth reporting, or risk being left behind.
