#formats – Alexandra Borchardt

The “NextGen News” project by Knight Lab and FT Strategies belongs among the largest qualitative endeavors to uncover news consumption patterns and preferences by young people across the globe. So far, two reports have been published, the latest one discussion habits by young news consumers in the US, Brazil, India, Nigeria, and the UK. For our study, we interviewed George Montagu who led the project for FT Strategies until December 2025.

FT Strategies is spearheading the international Young Audiences Initiative and in 2024 published a pathbreaking study on young news consumers, Next Gen News. Now you are doing an update. What have your most significant findings been?

George Montagu: One finding we are excited about is the idea of reversing the journalism process. Up until now, journalism production usually goes from: you have seen something or you have an idea, you research it, you write it, you edit it, and you publish it. Now, those on the innovative end of the scale think more in terms of format first: what’s the storytelling methodology that we use with this specific audience? And then they select stories based on that format and deliver them.

How did you find out about that? Because you talked to creators and then they told you?

Yes, we have spoken to about 70 news creators from all around the world with different sizes of following on different platforms. One of the things they talk about is that they don’t try to make the news entertaining. They don’t select stories from the mainstream news and then add their sprinkle of expertise on top. They do it the other way around. They’ve figured out a structure, a tone, a set of topics that work for their audience, and then they select stories based on that structure. Audiences love the familiarity of a repetitive structure that packages information in a way that they enjoy consuming it in.

In your 2024 study you didn’t just survey young people, you looked at what they actually did. Did you observe any discrepancies between their behaviour and what they said they did?

We didn’t see a load of difference. I genuinely think younger people don’t care. They don’t have this concept of having to be this really engaged, newsy type person. One quite interesting behaviour many young people described was that after they had seen a piece of news on social media, they substantiated it with a big news brand that they know and trust. When we did diary studies, we saw that behaviour ring true.

Did you see differences among the countries? You covered the US, the UK, Nigeria, India, and Brazil.

There were differences in opinion, especially towards the health of the news industry and how trustworthy the news is. But the actual types of behaviours were similar across geographies. Our hypothesis is: Where there’s less trust, people tend to go more for creators and people they trust. We recently asked 13- to 18-year-olds: ‘Where do you get the news from?’ They gave an about equal amount of time to news influencers, friends and family, and news producers. However, when we asked them: ‘Who do you trust as sources of quality information?’, news producers were mentioned much more often than friends and family, and news creators got almost twice as much trust. Just because people give someone a lot of attention doesn’t mean they trust them.

Our research shows that at least in Austria, young people trust news brands quite a bit.

It depends. If it’s information about beauty products, then they’re going to trust the beautiful individual in front of them more. If it’s about what’s going on in Gaza, they would probably prefer a mainstream news brand. News media used to cover all these needs, but now individuals often do a much better job with certain areas of expertise.

What in general do institutions need to know if they want to reach young people today?

Next Gen News focuses on the tactical things that you can do in storytelling, like putting your face on camera, making it personal, talking about your family and background. But at a much bigger level, we talk about investment allocation and distribution. A couple of decades ago, newspapers would spend 40% of their revenue on printing, distribution and vans. Today, news organizations have stripped lots of that cost from their business, but they don’t invest that money in new forms of distribution, which is video, audio, newsletters, and different types of formats. I’m trying to encourage news organizations to reinvest in distribution and new formats.

Wait, are newsletters a thing with young people?

We didn’t hear loads of young people say that they like newsletters. What they do love is notifications. They absolutely love a good notification well timed with relevant information that links them off to somewhere else. But I also advise companies to reallocate the time journalists spend. Now, they spend 80 to 90% of their time thinking, writing, researching a story, and 10% figuring out, maybe, ‘how do I put this on socials’. But what if they invested 50% in reading, researching, writing and 50% in turning this into something cool and innovative? No one’s asking for more content. They’re just asking for it in different formats and different styles.

Many publishers talk about “young audiences” as if they were a monolith. But commercial publishers often mean people in their 30s, because before that they wouldn’t buy subscriptions anyway.

When we at FT Strategies speak to clients, we ask, ‘what is your young audience?’ Because they differ so much. At the FT we think of 18- to 35-year-olds who are more on the ambitious end of the spectrum and interested in careers, business, finance, and politics. Some people say up to 40 or 45 is young, because it makes their numbers look better. The generalizations and the stereotypes around younger people are not helpful. This concept of them just loving short form video exclusively and spending all their time there is wrong.

If editors-in-chief invite you and give you a time slot of 15 minutes asking what they should do? What do you tell them?

First, I would recommend giving their journalists 30% to 40% more time to think about storytelling. Second, get your talent on camera and get them building affinity with your audiences by being authentic and telling stories. Third, increase your investment in distribution. What you need is people that are producers and that think in format terms rather than in story terms and give those people the power to work with your best journalists to create storytelling that is really alive. Finally, I would say that a lot of younger audiences don’t care much for objectivity or impartiality. Don’t be afraid to give some people the room to express their opinions and perspectives, even if they’re very different from the brand. Ultimately that builds connection and it’s what people want.

Are there also young people who say they appreciate different viewpoints?

Younger people don’t trust any of the information that they see first-hand. They always look for another reference point. And loads of the young people that we’ve interviewed say that they rely on building their own perspectives based on what other people say or think or share. That might be comment sections, it might be their favourite commentator, it might be another publication. Out of the 70 or so creators we talked to, maybe three or four said that they agreed with the concepts of objectivity and neutrality. The 66 others said that the idea of impartiality was fundamentally flawed and impossible at a theoretical level. They also said something like: ‘My audience doesn’t come to me for boring balance; they come to me because they value me and my opinion.’

What do you think are the most common mistakes newsrooms make – apart from people sitting around a desk saying: ‘Oh, what can we write for young people?’

The biggest mistake is a language and tone one. There’s still this approach of writing in an old school style that is meant to impress your colleagues more than your audience, insinuating: ‘Look, how imaginative and cool I’ve written this article!’ But a normal person just wants a normal tone of voice and vocabulary that they understand. Within that there’s a misconception that you have to dumb down language and make things really simple, which doesn’t mean making it simplistic. What you then realize is that 90% of people want the simple version of the story. So, the assumption that young people’s needs are totally distinct is quite bizarre.

How will AI shape the news consumption behaviour of young people – who are obviously much more attuned to using it already.

Obviously, a lot of younger people are using AI discovery tools to organize and find information for themselves. But their primary use cases are copy and pasting news into a chatbot asking, ‘can you summarize this for me?’ Or ‘can you simplify this for me so that I understand it?’ News companies should be doing this themselves on their own sites, so, that people aren’t taking their content off their platform.

Last autumn, the FT published a story asking, “Have we reached peak social media?” What should publishers do if that happens?

When I’m advising a company, I’ll say: ‘Think about formats, not platforms. What are the investments that you won’t regret making in format? Don’t think like: Let’s build a massive TikTok account and invest loads of money in that but: Let’s build a great short-form video portfolio and host it on our website, on our apps, on the watch tab as the New York Times now has? I’ve spoken to people with millions of followers on TikTok starting to tell me, ‘I’m good at seeing when the tide’s going out and I think the tide’s going out.’ But if people are not spending their time on socials, they’ll be spending their time elsewhere online. Private communities and channels seem to be the primary place where people are going to go and super apps when everything will be integrated in ChatGPT.

What do you think, what are the missing conversations around young audiences and news consumption?

It’s not the missing conversation, but it’s the really hard one: how do you make money off these people?

When we asked young Austrians for our research what they would pay for, they said that they’d pay for something really individualized.

This scares the living daylights out of me because 100% of that can be done. And it already is being done by chatbots and will only get better. For a lot of people fulfilling their news needs will be paying for a chatbot and being able to get summarized personalized news feeds based on their interests. People increasingly won’t pay for content, they’ll just pay for stuff associated to your brand, whether that’s events or products or whatever it is. But I would be really surprised if content remains a big differentiator for someone to be willing to pay for it.

This interview was conducted as part of the study titled “A miss is as good as a mile: A qualitative study on Gen Z and journalism in Austria, featuring perspectives from users, media professionals, and international experts”, commissioned by Mediengruppe Wiener Zeitung. You can find more information and the full study (in German) here.

In traditional newsrooms, political journalists tend to be those who call the shots. Even in the absence of statistics, it’s safe to bet that the majority of editors-in-chief used to cover politics before rising to the top job. This has shaped pretty much all of journalism. The “he said, she said” variety of news coverage that makes for a large part of political reporting has pervaded other subject areas as well. The attempt to give opposing parties a voice led to the so-called “both-sides journalism” which operates under the assumption that on the marketplace of ideas and opinions those will survive that serve the people best.

But the past few years have already demonstrated that this kind of journalism is not sustainable. First and foremost, it doesn’t serve humanity well in the case of imminent and severe threats like climate change or attacks on democratic institutions where bothsidesism is not an option. Also, newsroom metrics have shown again and again that audiences tend to be put off by news content that just amplifies opinions and intentions of decision makers without linking it to people’s lives. News avoidance is real and has been growing.

“What if reporting on racist, misogynist, dehumanizing opinions and comments has the opposite effect from what most journalists intend — normalizing propaganda and even making political candidates seem interesting?”

The result of the 2024 U.S. election and the rise of authoritarian leaning extremists in other democracies should have served as the final wakeup call for political journalism. What if the media’s calling out those who don’t respect democracy and its institutions doesn’t deter people from voting exactly those politicians into office? What if reporting on racist, misogynist, dehumanizing opinions and comments has the opposite effect from what most journalists intend — normalizing propaganda and even making political candidates seem interesting? And what if newsrooms who complain about political polarization have contributed their fair share to it themselves? Polarization has been a successful business model for journalism after all. These are hard questions that demand answers.

If they want to stay relevant in serving the public, newsrooms will have to double down on studying the impact of their political journalism and think about consequences. Otherwise, they will continue to preach to the converted and fail in their mission to inform people about real threats to their livelihoods. While there is no quick recipe to disrupt and reinvent political journalism, some of the following ingredients might help to develop an strategy and improve the result:

First, studying human behavior. There is plenty of research and evidence out there on how propaganda works, how those in or aspiring to power use the media to amplify it, and how people react to it. If journalists don’t want to be tools in the hands of those ready to abolish press freedom and erode democratic institutions, they better familiarize themselves with these mechanisms. Insights from communication and behavioral psychology should be part of all journalism education and shape newsroom debates. It has become obvious that values and emotions like a sense of justice, pride, shame, and fear shape people’s voting decisions often more than rational choice theory would suggest. Newsrooms must account for that.

Second, chasing data, not just quotes. For political journalists, quotes are data, for other people not so much. They deserve to know what happened, not what someone says they might want to see happening or intends to make happen once in power. Data journalism — increasingly improved by the capabilities of artificial intelligence — provides plenty of opportunities to paint pictures of the real world instead of the world of intentions and declarations. Political journalism can be more interesting when people see how politicians have actually performed in contexts where they were responsible. Needless to say that data journalism needs to be made engaging to appeal to a variety of audiences.

Third, connecting reporting to people’s everyday lives. Politicians have an agenda and journalists are often swayed by it; people are likely to have different ones. Observers might have been baffled that voters didn’t give the Biden administration credit for the strong state of the American economy, but apparently all many people saw before casting their vote was their rising cost of living. Most people care deeply about issues like housing, personal security, the education of their children, health, and care for aging relatives. Only, most of these issues are linked to citizens’ immediate surroundings, their communities. Unsurprisingly, local news tops the list of interests in all age groups when asked for their journalism preferences, as the 2024 Digital News Report revealed. But with diminishing investment in local journalism, many of these topics have been under covered in recent years. A disconnect between political journalism and people’s lives has emerged that needs to be remedied.

Fourth, choosing appropriate formats. Modern newsrooms target different audiences with different formats on the platforms these audiences engage with. Political journalism is still too focused on the audiences that they have traditionally served. It is often made for well-educated groups and decision makers. If newsrooms really want to reach people beyond the community of like-minded news consumers, they need to explore how these audiences can be attracted. There are high hopes in the industry that artificial intelligence can assist in making journalism more appealing and inclusive by transcending formats — converting content to text, video, audio, interactive chat, or even graphic novel by the push of a button. It is too early to tell how this will affect news consumption and audience figures in the real world, but many media leaders expect opportunities for stronger news uptake.

Fifth, learning from other fields of journalism. Political journalists tend to be aware of their importance in the internal hierarchy. Many of them feel proud to do “the real thing” instead of covering entertainment, sports, personal finance, and the like. This might help them to digest the fact that colleagues in other fields score higher in the audience metrics department. But it’s exactly these colleagues political journalists could learn from to improve their own game. They could ask the science desk how to best deal with data and how to break down complex matters in digestible formats. They might get some advice on humanizing stories from those reporting on sports or celebrities. They could learn from investigative reporters how to pace oneself when seemingly sensational material is at hand and how to cooperate with others. And they could practice churning out one or the other service story. In fact, the whole newsroom should be interested in improving political journalism, since at times politics is part of most subject matters.

If journalism wants to maintain its legitimacy, relevance, and impact — particularly in an age when artificial intelligence will make content production ubiquitous — it needs to urgently rethink political journalism. Making it appealing to broader audiences and attracting them to engage with it might be no less than a matter of its survival. Many media leaders are aware of this. Chances are that in 2025 newsrooms will finally rethink the paradigm of political journalism.

This text was published by Harvard University’s Nieman Lab in their Journalism Predictions for 2025 series.

Tag: #formats

Nieman Lab Prediction 2025: Newsrooms Reinvent Their Political Journalism

“What if reporting on racist, misogynist, dehumanizing opinions and comments has the opposite effect from what most journalists intend — normalizing propaganda and even making political candidates seem interesting?”