Welcome to Feature of Journalism, a podcast from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.
I'm Federico Roubini. They had a leadership development a day.
Is a special series of our podcast, and it's dedicated to the digital news report, 22 over seven episodes,
we are diving into the most comprehensive piece of research on news consumption around the world.
In this episode of the series, we're joined by Kirsten Eddy, research fellow at the Institute and co-author of the digital news report.
As part of the report, Kirsten has authored a special chapter on how younger audiences are engaging with news and episodes.
We will dive into some of the main differences between our generation's access and consume news and attitudes towards it.
Kirsten, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me.
So determined young people is typically vague, shall we first unpack what you mean in your research when we use this term?
Yes. This is such a great question because I think it's very easy for us to lump all young people into one big, monolithic category.
In our research, we tried to avoid broad generational claims, so we focus this on two separate groups.
The first are social natives, so these are 18 to 24 year olds who largely grew up with social networks and then digital natives,
which are twenty five to thirty four year olds who largely grew up in the information age.
But before the rise of social networks. Why is it important to consider young people news use habit?
I mean, I don't think it's it's new information that publishers and journalists around the
world are increasingly concerned about how to attract and engage young people.
These groups are critical. Audiences for news are going to positions.
I mean, they are the future generations of news consumers, but they're also increasingly hard to reach,
and they're incredibly diverse and have different media behaviours and attitudes than their older peers,
which I think makes one size fits all approach is particularly difficult for drawing these groups in.
From your research, what would you say is the main difference between how younger generations engage with news compared to older generations?
We really see a lot of differences in news behaviours based on age.
But in terms of how they're accessing news, I think one key difference that we continue to find over time is that younger
audiences overall are increasingly much more reliant on on side door sources to news.
That includes social media aggregator sites and search engines.
And they're far less loyal to news brands than older groups are.
And we see this difference being particularly striking amongst those social natives or 18 to 24 year olds.
We tend to associate younger people with some of the newer social networks like TikTok or Snapchat.
To what extent are young people using this for news?
I think that's a fair association and we definitely see the turn toward these newer social networks in general,
largely resulting from shifts in those social natives media behaviours, while the older groups kind of tend to have more entrenched media habits.
But I don't think the use of these platforms is quite as widespread as we might expect, and younger audiences aren't simply all tech talkers.
However, to give one example,
the percentage of 18 to 24 four year olds using TikTok for news has increased five fold over our markets over just a three year span,
so that was three percent in 2020, using that for news and 15 percent in twenty twenty two.
So while it is a fairly small percent, about 15 percent using TikTok for news and that is relatively low on its own,
these changes over a very short period of time are pretty striking. And I think it's important to note that this also varies a lot by markets as well.
So in Thailand, we see nearly a third of people under 35 using TikTok for news specifically.
But in the U.K., that number is only six percent right now.
Now, it might be difficult to generalise because of the of the differences you just mentioned,
but what do you think is the appeal of such platforms for news? Are there more visual?
What is that? Definitely. I think that's a piece of it.
And we actually we supplemented our survey data this year with qualitative research with 18 to 30 year olds in Brazil,
the U.S. and the U.K., and asked them a ton of questions about their news, habits and attitudes.
And many of them said that they're really drawn to kind of exactly what you said the form informal and entertaining style of visual media.
They often talked about platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube as being more personalised and diverse than traditional formats like TV.
They talked about it as a resource that they turn to for rapidly changing events like the Russia Ukraine conflict.
And they talked about it as a venue for some of their more niche interests and hobbies.
So some of the things that maybe we traditionally wouldn't even consider to be hard news in the first place.
One of the central question in the main report concerns a level of trust in news,
and we know one of the main findings this year is that overall trust in news is slightly down.
It is a case also amongst younger people and how the level of trust differ between generations.
Yes, that's certainly true. We continue to see longer term falls in interest and trust in news amongst younger audiences,
though, as you said, we do see this across age groups and markets.
So it's not just limited to our younger groups, but there are important differences in levels of trust by age.
Both the digital and social natives are our low, lowest trusting age groups.
So on average, across our forty six markets, only a third of both of these groups say that they trust most news most of the time.
And that's compared with nearly half of those who are 55 and older.
Specifically, if we look at recent years, we've faced so many, you know, big news stories that could have been seen as negative of the press,
but also have very profound direct impact on young people life COVID 19.
Think about it has disrupted people's young people's indication and perhaps the beginning of their careers.
The world overall are younger people engaging news because they find it relevant to their lives or tuning out because of all of the negativity.
What are they saying? This is such a great question, and it's one I've thought about a lot recently.
We continue to see news avoidance increasing around the world,
especially amongst younger groups, and even more so specifically for that 18 to 24 year olds.
Group and younger audiences largely had similar responses when we asked why they choose to avoid the news.
So there weren't major gaps between the sort of digital and social natives.
They often said that it has, as you said, a negative effect on their mood in the UK.
We heard that two thirds of news a Reuters under thirty five saying the news brings down their mood and some of our qualitative
research participants talked about forming particular news habits to avoid negativity or to protect their mental health.
They also often said that there's just too much news coverage of topics like politics or the coronavirus.
And I think this is especially important because it shows us that younger audiences aren't necessarily avoiding all news.
In fact, many of them are selectively avoiding topics like politics and COVID specifically.
So you suppose you talk about topics, but are there any differences in the types of music younger people in first place consume,
but also what they consider news in the first place?
There are, and I think,
those perceptions of of too much newsroom attention going toward topics like politics and COVID sort of reflect those differences.
We find that many young people have a much wider definition of what news is.
So in our qualitative work, they would often distinguish between the news as a sort of narrow traditional agenda of politics and current affairs,
and a broader news umbrella encompassing a whole range of topics from sports to celebrity gossip to culture and science.
And I think this also came through in our survey research this year.
Both of our younger groups are less interested in news in general than older groups,
and so it makes sense that they expressed lower interest in most news topics generally.
But they were particularly less interested in traditional beats like politics or international news than the older cohorts were,
and they were more interested in softer news topics like entertainment and celebrity or education news.
And I think we find that even many of the types of news that we often deem as a sort of young people topics so things like social justice,
mental health and wellness, climate change or fun news or satire.
These things don't necessarily translate into greater interest in news about these topics for all or even most younger audiences.
We talk about some of the reason for avoiding the news. But what about the reasons for accessing the news?
What are the main differences of this cohort compared to all the people?
When we asked about why people personally choose to keep up with the news this year, we actually see some similarities across our age groups.
On average across our markets, all age groups see the news as equally important for learning new things.
But we do see that our younger groups are slightly more motivated than older groups by how entertaining the news is and how shareable it is.
And they're slightly less motivated than older groups by that sense of duty to
stay informed of news or by feeling how feeling it's personally useful to them.
But this very drastically within each market.
So it became clear to us that young audiences engage in a sort of mix and match of motivations depending on their interests,
along with the types of content that they're thinking about or seeking out. Given that young people, by definition, the next generation of news,
consumers are engaging with journalism in different ways to their older counterparts,
what do you think news organisations can do to reach this demographic and ensure the viability of their respective outlets?
Are there any good examples out there that you can point to us of?
You know, organisation using innovative ways to attract younger audiences?
You know, as as we continue to see young audiences behaviours and preferences shift,
even in ways that distinguish the social natives from digital natives,
it's certainly more of a challenge for media organisations to attract them and to keep them around.
And I think it's important to note that some of what we see here a young news users as more casual, less loyal,
less trusting and more sceptical is sometimes out of the control of individual outlets,
and it isn't necessarily something that could just be fixed by creating a TikTok account.
But that said,
we do find that younger audiences are looking for more diverse voices and perspective tips and for stories that don't depress and upset them.
And I think this desire for diversity reflects a lot of opportunity for news organisations in offering a variety of formats and media,
an array of topics and niche content, a range of voices in terms of who they're hearing the news from and in spaces for casual versus serious tones,
as well as impartial versus advocacy centred approaches.
So I think where we see great examples of innovation is when organisations are connecting with the broad range of topics that young people care about,
where they're developing multimedia and platform specific content,
and particularly when they're aligning that content and tone with the format they're using,
rather than simply replacing what they already do or just expecting young people to kind of eventually come around to what's always been done.
And I think the former piece of that is particularly important because we do see there is value in what news brands already offer.
We see that in moments like the pandemic or the war in Ukraine, where they feel they need to know what's happening.
Many young people do value and turn to mainstream news brands.
Christine, thank you so much for joining us for a very insightful podcast.
Thank you for having me. Our guest today was Kidston A-D, first doctoral research fellow at the institute and co-author of the digital news report.
Thank you all for listening to this episode of Digital News Report. 2022 podcast series.
You can catch up on other episodes on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
If you want to read the report in full, you can find the online and digital news report dot org slash 2022.
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This was featured of Journalism, a podcast by the Writers Institute and Digital Academy and Live Action.