News production is undergoing an identity shift – young people keep turning away from TVs, newspapers and even media websites and choose to browse for updates on their smartphones. That prompts legacy newsrooms to reconsider traditional storytelling forms for something newer, fresher and generally more accessible. But do newsmakers know what young people want and need in their news diet? Researchers from FT Strategies and Knight Lab decided to find out. Their newly-published paper, Next Gen: Understanding the Audiences of 2030 dissects digital habits and needs of young people from the USA, India and Nigeria – and contains suggestions news producers can use to remain relevant and trustworthy by the next decade.

The findings, summed up in three key categories demonstrate that personalisation of news, heavy emphasis on accessibility and shifting storytelling forms will only continue to grow in demand.

The Fix sat down with contributors of the research Liat Fainman-Adelman and George Montagu to discuss how media can adjust to that demand.

Trusted sources

In conversations about the young generation’s digital habits, researchers found that brand names and industry accolades do not guarantee credibility for legacy newsrooms. First and foremost, young consumers seek out news sources they can relate to. Fainman-Adelman says that’s because the internet generation is used to following individual content creators and building an affinity with them.

“This is a generation that grew up not just on the internet, but in a social first environment,” she said, explaining that for young people, lived experiences of online personalities are often more appealing than hard news reports – Fainman-Adelman points out citizen journalism in Ukraine as a good example of building trust with audiences.

“We see individual citizen journalists basically blowing up online,” she told The Fix. “They might be in Ukraine themselves just taking a video on their phone. And all of a sudden, they’re given the recognition, because they’re actually experiencing what they’re speaking about directly.”

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Researchers suggest that newsrooms should showcase connections reporters have to their beats and let individual journalists build their own online presence. Montagu suggests steps like having pictures of authors and brief biographies explaining how they relate to the topics they work on. But Montagu says many organisations might not want to hype their employees’ individuality too much, as it won’t bring monetary benefits.

*Guiti News, a french investigative platform that covers migration, offers biographies of each contributor. The entries are written by a newsroom collague. (Screenshot from Guiti News)*

“There’s a potential risk that the stronger your individual brand is, as a journalist, the greater the likelihood of you just going off and doing your own thing,” he said. “But I think you can play to that advantage where individual journalists can still benefit from the reputability of major brands, and brands can benefit from the direct audiences that are cultivated through individual journalists.”

Montagu said some newsrooms are already experimenting with what he calls “the hub and spoke models” of ownership, where individual journalists and content creators serve as connection points to their target audiences – in the US, business brand Morning Brew allows social media creators to contribute to the newsroom, and Puck claims to “treat reporters like social media influencers.”

*Puck’s Teddy Schleifer breaks down a sentencing he just attended. His style of delivery is more conversational and does not sound like a newscast (Screenshot from Puck)*

Personal significance

The second topic that emerged in the interviews with gen-Z consumers was the relevance of topics covered in the news. Traditional newsmaking often presents a dichotomy between hard and soft news, saying that young people gravitate towards entertainment updates instead of learning about politics or crime. The dichotomy came up during group interviews, and researchers found that youngsters are far from being interested in just entertainment.

“A lot of young people actually expressed a really strong yearning to learn about the news in a more traditional lens,” Fainman-Adelman said. “But because there’s so much information to navigate, because they’re kind of new into their adult lives, they’re trying to sift through what is considered very complex and daunting information, to understand how it specifically relates to them and their life.”

Interviews established that gen-Z expresses interest in topics that have elements of actionability – they seek out explainers that aid their self-development, or read about political issues that are relevant to their immediate circles. Often enough they share new information in group chats and social media walls, creating a sense of belonging to a cause and doing something about it. This sense of actionability is what traditional media lacks, according to Montagu.

The young generation of consumers does not understand the utility and actionability of the news, because it’s not framed the right way
George Montagu

“You’ve got to give [news] meaning for different audience segments that have different needs and take different actions,” he said.

*We Are Not Divided by Reasons to be Cheerful highlights stories about positive collective change and encourages readers to take positive action in their communities (Screeshot from We Are Not Divided)*

Young consumers told researchers that they are already using personalised news accumulators, such as InShorts in India, that provides 60-word summaries of local news, or Opera News in Nigeria, where daily news are customised into a single feed. Montagu calls for more news organisations to embrace a similar approach with the help of AI and target algorithms.

*InShorts in India generates short summaries of daily stories. Readers can click on the original source to dive deeper into the topic (Screenshot from InShorts)*

“People are already doing customisation on social media,” he said. “They block accounts that provide things that make them upset and they purposefully view things that they like to see more of. So if you don’t offer [that] on news platforms, people will do their customisation elsewhere, or will just not come to you at all.”

Accessibility

Closely intertwined with the idea of personalisation is the notion of accessing news in more user-friendly forms. Traditional news organisations expect their readers to have master’s degrees and choose complicated language, says Fainman-Adelman. Interviews with young consumers show, however, that young people want to make sense of their news on the go – they prioritise convenience and simplicity.

*The Verge caters to gen-Z readership and has introduced a new, Twitter-like feed that offers a curated rundown of the day’s news (Screenshot from the Verge)*

Montagu says there is a reason why short-from videos have exploded over the last couple of years – video captions can not be overly complicated and short running times force news producers to go straight to the point: the videos basically mirror the ideal news experience for youngsters.

*Ros Atkins on… is a series of BBC News explainers that stands out for its simple language and accessibility about complicated issues*

“The next generation really doesn’t buy into the language that news is produced in. The reading level, the vocabulary, the sentence structure, the tone, don’t work for people,” Montagu said. “They want informality, familiarity and words that they can understand.”

Here, researchers hope news organisations will again use AI tools to customise accessibility levels of their content – Fainman-Adelman suggests making news more inclusive with options to simplify reading levels and article length, as well as features that make stories accessible for people with disabilities.

The fine line here, researchers say, is to stay on the point and not sugarcoat content under the pretence of making it user-friendly – the ideal approach is for news to be simple without being simplistic.

“We can still be informative without dumbing down our content,” Montagu said. “That’s definitely doable.”

Source of the cover photo: generated by ChatGPT, DALL·E

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