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“It is entertaining and non-fiction”: That’s one framework for envisioning how young audiences are thinking about news, according to a new report from FT Strategies and Northwestern University’s Knight Lab, funded by the Google News Initiative.
The report, “Next Gen News 2,” builds on research released last year about “the audiences of 2030 and the strategies to meet them.” The researchers surveyed 5,000 adults ages 18 and up, from five countries (the U.S., U.K., Nigeria, Brazil, and India), about their media consumption. (The oldest respondent was 101 years old.) The researchers also asked more than 80 young adults, ages 18 to 28, to keep daily diaries of their media usage for two weeks. One goal was to get a better sense of how young adults differ from older adults in their news consumption habits.
Here are some bits of the report that I found interesting.
— The practice of getting news from AI varies a lot by country:
“One notable pattern in our survey was the consistently more positive responses about AI among Nigerian respondents,” the authors write. Nearly 40% of Nigerians younger than 25, and more than a third of Nigerians in the entire sample, said they “often” get news from AI programs like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity. “In contrast, fewer than 5% of United States and United Kingdom respondents reported often getting news from AI programs.”
— There is no escape from news. Here’s Jeffrey A., an under-25 from the U.S.:
“[There’s] just too much information. I mean, you can’t even scroll through, like, like, Instagram or TikTok or open up a media app without just all sorts of different news outlets saying completely different things.”
Or Lily G., an under-25 from the U.K.:
“I think that the biggest challenge with news these days is knowing what’s real and what’s not. There’s obviously a lot of misinformation on places like TikTok, which is kind of one of the primary places I might get news from. Not even if I’m looking for it, like, it will just come up on my ‘for you’ page. But you’ll see something and you’ll think, I don’t really think that that’s right. A way to overcome it is to just kind of look into it yourself to see if you can find the right answer, like, through Google, but then even there, you just never know if what you’re hearing is true.”
— The inverted pyramid — most important information at the top — doesn’t work well on social, the authors say. (The primary evidence they cite for this is this post from 2021, which touted the “narrative accordion.”) Perhaps try these structures instead:
Problem — tension — reveal: Start with a relatable problem, build intrigue or conflict around what is at stake, and then deliver insight or resolution that satisfies curiosity.
Question — hypothesis — test: Pose a compelling question, offer a possible explanation, and walk the audience through the evidence or experiment that proves or disproves it.
Misconception — correction — takeaway: Begin with a common misunderstanding, clarify what people often get wrong, and close with the key lesson or reframed understanding.
You can see the full report here.
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