German public service media ARD and ZDF run a joint network called FUNK that has the mission and mandate to serve young people. For our study on Gen Z and News, commissioned by Wiener Zeitung Media Group, I interviewed FUNK CEO Philipp Schild.
Philipp, what do media companies need to know if they want to reach young people today?
Young people are used to consuming content very much based on their personal needs. This wasn’t possible with linear broadcast content in the same way as it is in the digital sphere. And that changes everything. The market is highly fragmented, and users expect everything to be perfectly tailored to them. Creators who aren’t used to stepping outside their own perspective, adopting a different one and working to understand it will find it hard to succeed.
When needs are so varied, whose perspective do you adopt? After all, there is no uniform ‘young’ audience.
We can’t choose; we have a mandate. Section 30c of Germany’s State Media Treaty stipulates that our content must appeal to young people aged between 14 and 29 and focus on their real-life experiences and interests. But these vary greatly. Imagine a 14-year-old and a 29-year-old. What needs do they actually have in common? For us as content creators, there’s only one sensible approach: to use a structured database to understand which people we’re not yet effectively serving across our portfolio. And then we need to consider how to reach them. It’s about understanding what codes these people need so that they perceive the content as being made for them.
How well do you reach different groups?
With 70 formats, Funk reaches 75 per cent of the target audience. We reach a few percentage points more highly educated young people than those with lower levels of education, but the differences aren’t huge. We really do our best to ensure there’s something for everyone. Our analyses have shown that we haven’t reached groups quite as effectively that are strongly attached to their home villages. Our content was more popular in urban areas. We’ve tackled this in various new formats.
Can you illustrate that with examples?
One thing worked particularly well: ‘Sagt mal’ (tell us) is actually one of our most successful formats. It focuses heavily on tradition and rural culture and aims at people who identify strongly with these aspects. However, we’ve found that it’s much easier for us to build contacts and film with people in western German towns than in eastern Germany, where there’s greater resentment towards public service media. There, we have to work much harder to build trust and invest a lot more time preparing before we can finally start filming. But we just get on with it, and then it works out.
Doesn’t the sense of community – which public-service media are supposed to foster – fall by the wayside when you tailor your content very closely to specific groups or communities?
A strong sense of identity within a community can prevent others from joining in. But you can overcome this by providing content that addresses universal needs. A format can become hugely popular if many people can identify with it. One example is Mai Thi (Nguyen Kim) with maiLab. She started out as a chemical scientist and remained relatively small for a while. Then she began to explore more and more topics that appeal to everyone. During the COVID-19 pandemic, her stuff suddenly became interesting for society as a whole.
The most controversial topic in our interviews was subjectivity. Experts said there was no point approaching young people with objectivity; they wanted a clear stance, authenticity and emotion. The young users we interviewed in Austria, on the other hand, valued objectivity, and studies such as the Digital News Report also document a need for at least a degree of professional distance. Are the respondents giving the answers researchers want to hear?
We carried out a study on subjectivity with Prof. Christoph Neuberger, who described ten different dimensions of subjectivity. This revealed that emotion is not always the key to success. There are very, or relatively, objective formats – such as 70-second Wikis with a clear factual basis – that are extremely successful. Emotion does not necessarily mean approaching things from a subjective perspective. It can simply mean feeling an emotional connection to a group. Of course, social media fosters emotions. But that does not mean at all that young people are no longer interested in information or facts. The need for a high level of source reliability is extremely high amongst parts of our audiences.
Young people are largely already using AI tools. How will new consumption habits in the AI era change the media industry?
The content market will change completely. Ten years ago, we might still have been able to make how-to videos. Who needs those anymore? Young people might even need fewer guidance from us on coming-of-age topics, because they’re forming relationships with ChatGPT. It may be that we need to completely rethink our approach and instead support them and build media literacy around these topics.
But AI can also help, for example, with switching between formats.
Above all, AI helps us with our workflows. We spend five days analysing a format and processing all the data. A machine can do that for you in an hour. That doesn’t mean that, in the end, anything at our company will function without people, but it does mean that, whilst people are still in the loop, a very large proportion of the work currently carried out by people can be done by machines. And the potential savings I see there, I’m channelling into AI profiles.
If you could give newsroom leaders three pieces of advice on what to bear in mind regarding young people and journalism, what would these be?
Firstly, let go of your structures, because those structures will guarantee that you won’t succeed. In five years’ time, you simply won’t be around anymore. The market is brutal. There’s going to be a revolution in content generation and distribution. We’re already preparing for that. Point two: Adjust your budgets. You need to consider who will be using your content in the future. And you must tailor your budgets to them. Your entire structure is still geared towards serving the people who are there at the moment, but they won’t be around for much longer. And they may well have started getting their content from YouTube in the meantime. And thirdly, listen to the people who understand how young people’s content works and try to rebuild your structures in collaboration with them. Or, if you’re too big for that: create a dedicated unit, investing a significant portion of your budget as an investment for the future. Then, at some point, you’ll reap the benefits of the ideas that grow within these units.
What is not discussed enough when it comes to young people and the media?
Product development is always just about what we do, and very rarely about the end result, what sticks in people’s minds and what it triggers. Nevertheless, media professionals should keep reminding themselves: anyone who does something for young people is doing something for democracy.
This interview was led for the research study “Knapp daneben ist auch vorbei” that was published in April 2026 by Mediengruppe Wiener Zeitung. It is available in the original German version here.