Publishers wake up to serving younger audiences

Younger audiences have not been shy about telling news publishers what they want. The challenge is for news publishers to accept that the next generation has a different style of gathering information and provide the news in new forms. Until now, news publishers have tried slightly different approaches without making fundamental changes. Efforts like media literacy initiatives are well intended. But all too often, publishers’ goal with media literacy programs is to train young audiences to like the news products those publishers already make, rather than adapt their products to evolving tastes. Teams dedicated to serving younger audiences or finding traffic help, but mostly they shift the burden away from reporters and editors without meaningfully changing the product.

In 2023, the Knight Lab and the Financial Times’ Strategies team conducted ethnographic interviews with 45 young news consumers from three countries: the United States, Nigeria, and India. We found stark disparities between the desires of young news consumers, across all three countries, and the expectations of news publishers. We’ll publish the full results in 2024, but it’s clear that changes are needed, and it seems like publishers are finally ready to listen.

2024 will be the year that news publishers wake up to what they already know but don’t want to acknowledge: News needs to change to meet the needs of young people today, and all people in the near future. News publishers will begin to discover the right ways into people’s lives, in the right formats and the right lengths. News publishers will start to meet young audiences and prepare for the future by:

• Thinking like creators, acting like influencers, and supporting those in their newsrooms who are prepared to do so.
• Featuring different journalists who are more relatable and relevant to specific audiences — sometimes on the same stories.
• Embracing artificial intelligence in ways that support personalization and customization to lower barriers to understanding.
• Breaking the tyranny of style guides and embracing the language that audiences employ.
• Exploring different formats of stories that go beyond legacy forms like the inverted pyramid.
• Acknowledging that many readers want to know more than just what happened; they want to know how they can help or why they should have hope.

Catering to the needs of younger consumers doesn’t mean abandoning older ones. It means acknowledging that the ways humans communicate are changing rapidly and recognizing that the habits of younger people presage widespread societal shifts. News publishers who start evolving now will connect better with young users immediately and most users soon enough.