Tag: #Liesbeth Nizet

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Beyond the Algorithm: 10 Strategies for Attracting Young News Audiences

There are many assumptions but surprisingly little evidence of how to engage young audiences with news. Commonly voiced concerns are that young people just consume short-form video, trust creators more than news brands and won’t pay for news anyway because they are just not that interested, particularly not in politics. 

But reality is more nuanced: In some settings young people do trust media brands more than personalities, they follow the news avidly, and they demonstrate considerable attention spans if invested in something, even for text-based products. 

My co-author Jana Koch and I  tested these and more assumptions in a qualitative research project, commissioned by Austrian Wiener Zeitung Media Group. We based our study on structured interviews with young people and media leaders in Austria and with more than a dozen international experts, amounting to a total of 58 in-depth interviews. We then contrasted our findings with the latest research by leading organisations like the Reuters Institute’s “Understanding young news audiences” and the NextGen News project, a Knight Lab/FT Strategies cooperation. 

The full report, Knapp daneben ist auch vorbei is available in German and English  here. 

So, what is it exactly that media leaders need to know when serving young audiences? There is no one-size-fits-all solution, of course. But we have identified 10 evidence-based strategies to guide media leaders. 

1. Understand and Serve Audiences

There is no such thing as “the” young user. Expectations and habits differ not only between generational cohorts, but also within them. The old mass media formula “one size fits all” no longer works. You need to decide which community to serve on which platform, and to understand which codes to use to reach them. 

This can best be achieved by letting young colleagues in your organisation take the lead. 

Our interviews suggest: young users are indeed interested in politics, the economy, and international affairs, provided the perspective and narrative style suit them. 

Different platforms serve different purposes: Long podcasts, video documentaries, and games serve a different purpose than short videos, push notifications, and WhatsApp messages. 

What doesn’t work, for sure: Cramming everything into TikToks, or presenting every message as comedy. 

2. Add Value to People’s Lives

The digital world delivers content in abundance. Information overload and news avoidance are prevalent. Young people want to use their time wisely. 

They expect journalism to provide not just updates, but also explanations, solutions, and perspectives. 

They derive additional value from a particular voice or new forms of news experiences, local or niche context, narrative styles, or perspectives that surprise, dive deeper, or are closer to the reality of their lives. 

Marco Kruse, Managing Director of Ingame, Ippen Media’s youth initiative: “As a young person, you don’t just want to hear all day about the problems of the present; you want to know what your future looks like and what the solution is.” 

Doing less but doing it better is a valuable strategy. This holds particularly true for the AI era which is likely to put an end to copy-and-paste journalism. 

3. Be Confident

Journalism has something to offer, and young people get that. So, don’t sell yourself short, but deliver exactly what your core business is: independent, fact-based, strong journalism. Anyone determined to make any content funny or imitate slang is set up for failure. “Don’t try to be cool, because that is not your role”, says Pierre Caulliez, who leads Wan-Ifra’s News Creator Exchange programme. 

Users come to media brands precisely for what they can’t find elsewhere. And media companies can confidently promote that. The most successful German news brand on social media, public service ARD’s Tagesschau, shows how this can be done.

Timo Spiess, Tagesschau’s Head of Social Media, says: “We try to find a conversational tone (…) that conveys: ‘we take you seriously, we take this platform seriously, but we also take ourselves and our brand seriously.’”

4. Build Personal Brands

International research suggests that young people trust individuals more than brands. However, this perspective is shaped by experiences in countries like the US, where there are no public service media that have a mandate to serve all of society, or in settings where state interests have captured mainstream media. 

Creators sense gaps where they find them and happily step in. In contrast, our research shows that young adults in Austria and Germany continue to trust major media brands. 

However, individual creators gain traction when they have demonstrated clearly recognisable expertise in niche areas. 

That said, authenticity is a core value for young people. Amid the surging flood of automatically generated content, they’ve developed a particularly keen sense for whether something or someone is “real.” 

This opens opportunities for media: they can strategically build personal brands. The key though,  is not to stake everything on a single individual, but to develop clearly distinct voices. 

This also helps decrease the risk of losing popular content creators and their following. As Spiess describes: “The brand is the star. The brand is carried by faces. But these faces always step back a little behind the brand.”

5. Make Diversity Visible

Many young people are allergic to what newsrooms have long characterised as quality journalism: the know-it-all attitude, preachiness, complex phrasing, or irony and sarcasm. 

This suggests: Don’t talk about young people, but with them – and let them speak for themselves. Especially in ageing societies, the perspectives of young people are often overlooked. 

Co-creation can do wonders, but don’t assume that everyone wants to participate. In general, young people want more diversity of perspectives in news media, but this needs to go beyond the buzzword: different social backgrounds, experiences, and life stories need to be reflected. 

Funk, the youth network of German public media ARD and ZDF, for example, had determined through data analysis that it struggled to reach audiences with strong roots in rural areas. This led to “Sag mal,” which, in the words of Funk CEO Philipp Schild, became one of their most successful formats: “It focuses heavily on tradition and rural culture and is aimed at people who have a strong sense of identity in those areas.” 

Interestingly, the young Austrians we interviewed voiced rather traditional expectations in news, emphasising objectivity as a journalistic value. This contrasts with assumptions – also by some of our expert interview partners – that young audiences explicitly demand a point of view.  

6. Build and Retain Relationships

Media need to be present in the everyday lives of young adults to build connections, ideally relationships. Don’t wait for them to come to you, but go where they already are: on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, in algorithmic feeds – or to their schools, youth clubs, and universities. 

Real-life encounters can foster closeness. If you can afford it, organise workshops, guided tours, even festivals. They do not necessarily need to be about media. Relationships are built through presence, relevance, and shared experiences.

Caulliez says that publishers underestimate the potential of events: “When someone attends a specific event, they are 10 times more likely to remember the brand than if they only watch 10 seconds of YouTube Shorts from the same brand. It creates added value to build connections to different types of events throughout a person’s entire life cycle.” 

7. Diversify Monetisation

Purely transactional monetisation models like subscriptions appeal to very few young adults, especially as, in many European countries, every household has to pay the public service media license fee. 

This does not rule out a willingness to spend money on private news media, but people will only pay for tangible added value such as an experience or a feeling of identity. 

Liesbeth Nizet, Head of Future Audiences Monetization at Mediahuis says: “Creating a sense of belonging is super important.” Many publishers fail to reach young people with their product offerings. Some are not even known to them, others come across as inflexible, overloaded, or outdated. Younger audiences are used to personalisation and choice. A student subscription alone is not an innovation.” 

Nadine Eibl (formerly Günther), new product and innovation manager at German publisher Funke says: “Media companies simply need to realise that it’s pointless to force the existing offers onto young audiences.” 

Our interview partners see products for young users primarily as an investment in the brand and thus the future; some found potential in branded content. Nevertheless, investing in young audiences often pays off in a different way.

Many media companies have learned that formats for younger people often attract broader segments of society than their traditional fare. 

8. Think in Formats

Simply investing in vertical short-form video won’t do the job. Social media channels differ, and the data from each platform reflects how the respective algorithms interpret certain signals.

Of course, this type of analysis is thankless, because just when you think you’ve figured out a pattern, third party-platforms might change it. A dataset compiled by the Financial Times in October 2025 for a story titled “Have we passed peak social media?” even revealed that time spent on social media has been declining since 2022.

Many young people are themselves unhappy with their excessive social media consumption, and political initiatives want to curb access for kids and teenagers. 

“There is definitely a backlash against noise” says Nic Newman, Senior Research Associate at the Reuters Institute in Oxford. While the extent of news consumption via social media platforms will remain significant for a few more years, media companies should develop formats that could also thrive on their own platforms.

George Montagu, who oversaw the NextGen News project for FT Strategies, recommends redirecting energies from content to formats: “Right now, they (journalists) spend 80 to 90 percent of their time thinking, researching, and writing, and 10 percent figuring out ‘How do I package this for social media?’

“But what if they invested 50 percent in research and writing and 50 percent in turning that into something cool and innovative? No one is asking for more content. They’re asking to receive content in different formats and styles.”

9. Optimise for AI and Convenience

In the digital world, consumer expectations are shaped by Netflix, Spotify, and the like. This applies to both content and user-friendliness, the so-called user experience (UX). 

Journalistic products must be easily accessible and navigable. Younger consumers also expect that important news will somehow find them. With developments in AI, media consumption habits are likely to change. Much content might soon no longer be consumed directly by humans but read by machines first. 

However, many of our interviewees see opportunities for media companies in the world of synthetic content and overload. 

For example, verifying factual accuracy is becoming more important. And some professionals see an advantage precisely for brands that focus on people. 

Smilla Schwörer, business development manager at Funke and herself a Gen Z, says: “People overestimate how open young people are to AI. Young people want real people, real opinions, real faces, and real stories. I’d say the Boomer generation is much more likely to listen to an AI podcast than we are. We’re probably also a bit quicker at recognising AI and are therefore a bit more critical of the whole thing.”

10. Innovate Fast

The media industry is losing young audiences less due to a lack of ideas than a lack of courage. Innovation requires a different mindset: less fear of failure, less clinging to routines, and more trust in experimentation. Innovation-friendly leadership means allowing for setbacks and delegating responsibility but also shifting resources from declining to growing parts of the company. Young media professionals who understand the codes, languages, and dynamics of digital communities, should be encouraged to step up instead of being cornered into some social media team with no career prospects.

Sophia Smith Galer, independent news creator and member of Mediahuis’ Future Insight Board, recommends media leaders to make explicit that all staff is responsible for a company’s financial health: “Everyone should be required to do something to innovate every year”. 

Conclusion

Reaching young people is a challenging task that requires a strategy: it involves lots of data analysis, experimentation, and a shift in thinking. Many assumptions need to be discarded, along with the structures that go with them.

But Gen Z displays less news fatigue than is often claimed. Spiess from Tagesschau: “The younger generation also wants to dive deeper into things. … (Reaching young people) is a challenge. But it can be done.”

The reward for these efforts isn’t just about securing the future of a newsroom or a company. As Funk’s CEO Schild says: “Anyone who does something for young people is doing something for democracy.”

This text was written for and published by the World Association of Newspublishers Wan-Ifra on 12 June 2026.

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“Creating a sense of belonging is super important. You need to inspire them and get them excited”

Liesbeth Nizet’s job title is a first – at Mediahuis and presumably elsewhere: She works as Head of Future Audiences Monetization. In this context she oversaw the launch of Spilnews, a brand designed for young news consumers. Mediahuis operates out of Belgium and the Netherlands and owns an array of European media brands, among others the “Irish Independent” and the “Aachener Zeitung” ( Germany). We interviewed Liesbeth for our study on Gen Z and News, commissioned by Wiener Zeitung Media Group. 

Liesbeth, you are Head of Future Audiences Monetization at Mediahuis, a pioneering role created to explore and validate opportunities for engaging young people with news. Why was that needed?   

Liesbeth Nizet: Our organization has a long tradition of bringing people to our platforms and monetizing them there. But now a whole world of news is created outside on third-party-platforms. It was important to raise awareness, but also to force concrete choices about how we engage and monetize audiences beyond our owned platforms. It’s an and-and story, we need to make sure Mediahuis is also part of that next generation journalism, next to the loyal subscribers on our platforms.

How would you define that: next generation journalism?

Young people often don’t feel represented by traditional newspapers. News creators for example are much better at establishing that connection. Our newsrooms needed to understand that it is not enough to create something that is relevant for society, but if we want to reach younger people, it also needs to be relevant for the audiences they are creating it for. That requires different formats, different voices, and different success metrics.

You created SPILNEWS, a brand by young people for young people that is serving audiences on social media platforms, namely TikTok and Instagram. What made you do this? 

Developing formats for young people that fit all our brands didn’t work out, because every brand has its tone of voice and its way to look at who it wants to be for younger audiences. In 2025 we made the strategic choice to create journalism with a focus on Gen Z, the 18- to 24-year-olds. Gen Z is the most rebellious generation, more so than Millennials and the Alpha Generation. They really know what they want, and they want authenticity, they don’t like compromises. If you put only a few Gen Zs into an existing newsroom, they leave or they will take over the existing routines. That’s why we built a separate team, with a clear mandate to learn fast and structurally feed insights back into the organisation.

How is SPILNEWS different from the other journalism your brands produce?

For one, everyone who works for SPILNEWS is younger than 25. The topics they are covering are automatically relevant to them. In traditional newsrooms editors tend to say, ‘Let’s look at TikTok for trends that are interesting to younger people.’ But that means they are writing about young audiences not from their perspective. SPILNEWS is not about making content that is youngish or cool or short. It is about designing journalism that fits how younger audiences actually consume, trust and value information. And it’s about representation. For example, we did something about financial fitness. That’s super interesting to young people. But if it’s primarily about topics that would meet the needs of many of our (older) subscribers – second home ownership and such –, we lose them. You cannot be everything for everyone, and trying to be is one of the biggest risks for relevance. We did focus groups to find out how to be relevant for this group. 

What did the participants tell you?

Three things stood out: First, they told us, when they looked at traditional news brands, they didn’t feel like they belonged there. Second, they said if there was something bad happening, they wanted to know it but didn’t want to just hang in there, they wanted to find out how to be part of the solution. The third and in my opinion most relevant thing was, they said that they know that with TikTok they are exposed to only one side of the story. But they explicitly wanted to have different perspectives to be able to form their own opinions.

We keep hearing young people explicitly appreciate a point of view. 

What we see is that they appreciate different perspectives, like from someone who lives in the countryside versus someone who lives in a city, a student or a working young person, etc. Today all of the creator-journalists in the SPILNEWS team represent different perspectives, focusing on their topics and interests. We have someone who works on politics, he’s looking at party programs and their effects on younger people and discusses this with politicians. Someone else is super interested in technology. She discovered that when you are on Vinted – the second-hand clothing platform popular among youngsters – you are able to buy weapons there when using certain keywords. She actually tried it and then went to the police with it. Another person works on inequality and justice and someone else covers human interest stuff, for example, what you do to prevent a hangover. And we work with creators, like the 20-year-old journalism student who has a disability. He is making videos for us on how it is to be young and face all these hurdles.

Many publishers have experimented with youth brands, most failed to attract sizeable audiences. What have your experiences been? 

Thanks to SPILNEWS we are able to learn so much for our traditional brands. For example, the way we work with creators or with advertisers. We have adopted it for some of our regional brands, and it is super relevant. We have people in our traditional newsrooms who started their own TikTok accounts – I would have never thought that these individuals would. And that starts a movement showing our staff what journalism can be beyond the established routes.

It is more about learning than about commercial results then.

Learning is the primary goal in this phase but always with a clear view on monetization logic. For example, we started with branded content. We work with creators who bring stories that appeal to young people, like a campaign paid for by the government about healthy eating, featuring a hockey player who presented all the snacks he consumed during the day. 

Many including most of our interview partners say young people cannot be monetized. 

First, younger people and advertisers can be a match if you do it the right way. And second, from a subscription perspective, it’s important to show young people what journalism is because only that will get them to subscribe with other brands at some point in their lives, it is a long-term investment. So you cannot just ignore them. We know that the willingness to pay for news is low with young people. But on the other hand if you see what they are paying for – Netflix and the like – it is a call for us to reflect on why they pay for something. Creating a sense of belonging is super important. You need to inspire them and get them excited. They might take on some kind of membership, but only if it feels like entering a community, not just for access as a transactional relationship. 

Do you approach all young people alike, or do you segment young audiences? 

The needs of young audiences differ depending on their life stages and their interests, of course. Some might be working students, other young parents. You need to be aware of that and make sure that your newsroom is diverse enough. We analyse the data we get from the platforms and then we adjust. 

If you were advising editors in chief from a traditional newsroom: What would be your top three recommendations? 

The first one would be: meet your audiences where they are with your journalism, not with the recommendation ‘download our app’ or a marketing message. Show them what journalism for young people looks like. I’m pretty sure that when you make them feel they count, you will have the chance to interact with them. Representation matters. My second advice would be to follow the way the platforms are working. It’s – unfortunately – not on us to decide what a great video looks like on TikTok, you have to adjust to their rules. And third, invest in voices, because people follow people a lot more than brands. 

How will AI change all these dynamics, since young people are flocking to AI tools?

AI is a great enabler for efficiency, for summarizing, maybe also for discovering blind spots at some points. But I think it will force us to do what journalism is meant to be for, that is going to the streets looking for stories. What really matters for younger generations is authenticity. They will appreciate the convenience of AI. But human curiosity, the art of finding and telling stories is something really human, and I don’t think that it will be replaced by machines on the short term.

What has surprised you most in your work with younger people? 

What surprised me most is that we often think younger people are not interested in news. And when young people tell you that they don’t feel they belong in your news brand, that is an invitation, not a critique. They want your content, your stories but in a way that fits them and their way of life. When it comes to the newsroom, young journalists are interested in so many things, full of ideas, energy and good vibes, but they need some good leadership from our side. We need to channel that to make them grow and to make our journalism grow. 

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”, conducted for Wiener Zeitung Media Group by Jana Koch and myself. You can find more information and the full study here.