Tag: #media

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“The launch vehicle must be a human being”

Toan Nguyễn belongs among Germany’s best known marketers who specialize on young audiences. He founded the agency Jung von Matt NERD, a spin off of the famous agency, where he worked until the end of 2025. I interviewed Toan for our report on Gen Z and news for Mediengruppe Wiener Zeitung.  

Toan, many media companies are working hard on getting the next generations hooked on their products. But is there such a thing as THE young audience?

Young people use media differently because they were exposed to media and technology at a different time than older generations. It’s true that they have a shorter attention span. Forms of presentation need to be adapted to this. Nevertheless, I prefer to talk about ‘style groups’ rather than target groups – people who stand out because of shared beliefs, interests, passions, mentalities and worldviews.

What would be a style group for you?

My classic example is a 21-year-old with a yoga mat and a mindfulness app standing next to a 51-year-old who also does yoga in the organic food store by the almond butter shelf. She probably has more in common with her than with another 21-year-old who comes from the chemist’s and has a cheap brand of lip gloss in her bag. So, I prefer to look at: What are the values, hierarchies, beliefs and principles that these people have? And of course, there are very different style groups within Generation Z. As a marketer and communicator, I have to think carefully about which messages I convey to whom.

As the founder and managing director of Jung von Matt Nerd, you developed many products for young people. Your task was, as they say, disruption.

Many of the products I created appealed to a wide range of age groups. This is best illustrated by the example of Super Mario Haribos (a type of sweets), which I co-invented. People thought about it as a great rejuvenation measure. But the product sells across all age groups. Nevertheless, the secret sauce of every successful work I have done is that it was anchored in a community. It’s also called ‘community-centric creativity’.

Could the media industry learn something from this?

I think so. The big difference between my approach and traditional marketing is that I look at what’s happening outside: where are these communities of interest emerging, and how can I connect with them? This is the so-called ‘outside-in approach’ from management literature. Old marketing was always inside-out. It was all about the brand essence, brand values and stories that were penetrated through classic channels with a large media budget. Back then, pop culture was also a question of volume and frequency. Today, pop culture emerges in niches and around influencers.

The traditional approach describes the situation in many newsrooms: you sit around a table or on a Teams call and think about which topics might be interesting  for ‘young users’. What advice would you give to editors-in-chief? 

I’d mention three things: First, develop outside-in expertise and don’t work from an ivory tower. Second, build personal brands. I think that’s the most important thing. People trust people who write about people, and that’s even more true for younger generations. They no longer trust logos. A logo like ARD or, in Austria, ZIB can be a seal of quality, a reassurance, but the launch vehicle must be a human being.

But that also carries risks. If followers are attached to a creator or news influencer and these make mistakes or behave unethically, the reputation of the entire media brand may suffer.

I am clearly referring to the plural: several strong personal brands. Every top journalist must build their own reach, become their own face and stand for an opinion. That is the only distribution that still works. A company account has eight times less organic reach than a personal account. That is a waste of money. That is one thing, the other is pluralism. Good journalistic products are usually part of the discourse. What I still don’t understand is why publishers don’t build up different protagonists and play with them.

Because they often only serve one community, at least in terms of political orientation.

I believe, and this is the third point, that you have to build your editorial team like a football team. Not everyone has to do the same thing. Some should polarise, do a bit of clickbait, be strikers. Others should defend a bit, make sure the facts are correct. You have to build diversity into your team. If you only have ten goalkeepers, you’re boring. If you only have ten clickbaiters, you’re not credible. And you need substitutes and young players. You have to train your trainees so that you can bring them on as substitutes.

Where does the media industry stand in terms of these criteria, and what is going wrong?

Two years ago, I could have listed a long list of mistakes, but I think there is energy in the industry again, something is happening. A lot has changed in terms of craftsmanship. But there is a lack of personal brands. And there is a huge opportunity in community building. Media companies could get much more involved in events to build loyalty and connect different strands.

What has changed in the last two years? Have you observed a generational change?

Yes, you can see that in some companies, the people at the top are a bit younger. There is also more investment in video content and other formats, which I think is good. But there are also opportunities in print in the magazine sector.

Really? Most companies are winding that down.

I think print journalists are simply writing about the wrong people, such as male CEOs over 55 who don’t sign off anything without the approval of their press officers. That’s inauthentic. It would make much more sense to pick up on trends and personalities from the online world and honour them, so to speak, with a print appearance. That can work.

Are there other formats that are underdeveloped in the media industry?

Video podcasts. They are growing nine times faster than normal podcasts. We are 100 years behind in this area. The US market is constantly showing us how it’s done.

How do you imagine journalism in the age of AI?

It will be a challenge for journalism. For the media industry per se and for anyone who has prided themselves on using their head. I see a renaissance of craftsmanship, where you see what you have done, fulfilment and a good feeling. It will be brutally difficult for young people in journalism. They will have to establish themselves as personal brands. Just being smart and doing research is no longer enough. They have to get out into real life, be on the ground, deliver documentation in photos and videos. Then there will be a few luminaries where people will want to know: What is their opinion, how do they analyse things? And in the field of feature pages and lifestyle, only those with truly excellent taste will prevail. My three Rs in the age of AI are reputation, reach and relationships. You have to build a reputation, establish relationships and have reach.

Are there any topics that need to be discussed more looking at young people and the media?

That we have a misleading concept of diversity. Diversity as it is created today always means we have a black person, an Asian person, a woman, an old man, and they all hang out together. That’s not what a peer group looks like; it doesn’t look like that in any school yard. Arabs hang out with Arabs, Asians with Asians. But there are just a few content formats that serve this need. Why not have a special edition of ZEIT magazine just for the Asian or Arab community in Germany? It’s no coincidence that one of the most successful German shows of the last ten years was 4 Blocks.´

Because traditional media have a universal claim: they want to bring people together – public broadcasters are even obliged to do so.

There are ideas on how to balance a format for specific people and specific cultural circles. I’ve always found it strange that there’s nothing like that out there.

When you look back on your time at Jung von Matt, what surprised you the most?

That rebelliousness and creativity are superpowers that are no longer sufficiently appreciated in Germany. There is an increasing search for consensus and security. It sometimes happens that individual opinions without any factual basis carry incredible weight. Experts put months of work into something, have the data on their side, and then the CEO’s wife doesn’t like it – and contracts worth millions are cancelled.

This interview was published in German here. It was part of the report “Knapp daneben ist auch vorbei” that was commissioned by Mediengruppe Wiener Zeitung and published on 8th April 2026. You can find the full report here (English version forthcoming). 



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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.

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“No one is asking for more content. They are just asking for it in different formats and different styles”

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.

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“There’s definitely a backlash against noise”

Being the longtime lead author of the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report, Nic Newman has collected data on news consumption for more than a decade. By analyzing data and leading focus groups, he and his co-researchers have observed significant changes in behavior by young audiences: These days they overwhelmingly access news via social media and expect the consumption experience to be frictionless. I interviewed Nic for a research project on Gen Z and News by Mediengruppe Wiener Zeitung.  

Nic, you have studied news consumption behaviour of different age groups for decades. What do media organizations need to know if they want to reach young people today? 

Nic Newman: People who grew up with social media show very different behaviours from those of previous generations. They want everything friction-free – ­and immediately –  and they want to consume content where they are. They don’t want to go to news websites or apps. And they want their consumption to be easy, entertaining, fun. That’s a big challenge because do you change your journalism to make it more entertaining and fun? Or do you just accept that they’re going to come less often to you because you’re not very entertaining and you’re not a lot of fun?

Is there such a thing as “the young audience” some in the media are talking about, or does your research reveal different young audiences? 

One of the defining features of this younger audience is just how varied their consumption is. We’ve done qualitative work where we’ve talked to individuals in different countries, and everyone has got different media habits. For example, it’s not true that all young people use TikTok for news. There are many who hate TikTok. We found people who had very clear routines, almost like those of newspaper readers. We saw them reading The Economist at exactly the same time every morning on their commute as they briefed themselves on the things they needed to know for work. You have the typical lifestyle effects when as you get older and go into a job, there’s information you need. Just young people’s way of accessing that information is going to be different, the unhappiness with any kind of friction applies to all. 

Presumably education and social status matter, too.

Education is always the biggest divider in terms of how interested people are in news. The more interested people are in news, the more likely they are to build a relationship with a brand or with an individual. That’s the other big trend: that many young people prefer to access news through an individual they trust. 

You did a major report on creators for the Reuters Institute. What were your key findings?

It varies by country. We all know the politically polarizing creators in the US, the Joe Rogan types. There are a lot less of these in Europe. There you see more of those educator types like MrWissen2go in Germany. In explanatory journalism creators are clearly filling a gap that traditional media does not fill. The third area is the specialists who are building really deep, authentic relationships in a particular subject area. This also threatens traditional media companies, because these individuals have an incredibly low cost base. Many of them came from mainstream media but now think it’s better to operate on their own. 

Some data shows we have reached peak social media – now that even the most backwards media brands have realized they need to give it a go. 

There’s definitely a backlash against noise. But it might be impossible to even talk about social media anymore. Social media used to be social: about what your friends were doing. But that has been declining. In the past two to three years, it has developed from content that came from someone you knew to content that is essentially driven popularity using AI driven algorithms. A lot of that is fuelled by video. People aren’t getting bored with YouTube or TikTok, that’s growing. 

What does that mean for the media industry? 

One of the implications is the competition for attention within the new discovery mechanisms. The platforms are setting themselves up as creator friendly, they want to attract the best content that’s going to keep people’s attention. And again, they find that although professional media is part of that, people are paying more attention to non-professional media, to authentic personalities. Younger people are paying a lot of attention to people who look like them. Traditional media are struggling to behave like creators, because their sometimes less objective approach doesn’t fit with journalistic norms. The other growth area is through AI. Young people are more likely to access news and information through AI, because it’s friction free, quick, easy, and gives them what they want, it is personalized. 

What would you recommend editors and media organizations to do in this situation where both is quite foreign to them: creators and AI-based discovery?

Most media companies are thinking about investing more in video, particularly in vertical video that builds an authentic trust relationship. You’ve seen the New York Times and a range of other media companies putting vertical video on their front pages, trying to bolster the visibility of their own personalities and journalists to the extent that these are looking directly at you in the camera, building that sort of authentic direct relationship. They’re trying to copy a few creator techniques. Other strategies are to partner with creators or to co-opt them and bring them on staff. A whole list of companies have done that, in the UK for example the Daily Mailand the Independent. The third possibility is to engage with existing creators in particular fields, for example in investigations to help with distribution or content creation

What are the most common mistakes that you observe in newsrooms – apart from not doing anything for young audiences?

Probably the biggest mistake is an old newsroom trying to be down with the kids. Some older television anchors have done very well on TikTok, but in general, young people do not want you to dumb down. They want you to maintain your credibility and institutional authority. Don’t not cover politics or other important subjects because young people are spending less time on these issues. Try and make it accessible. Think hard about the formats you’re using. This works for older people as well. The other common mistake is to do a brand for young people, unless you do it to learn something from it. There have been very few cases where that has been successful. 

Why is that? Some young editors in large media companies have put quite some effort into developing those brands. 

Because in most of those cases you’re trying to get young people to do something they don’t want to do, which is come directly to an app or to a website. And if it’s a brand that only works in social media, you might as well build a personal brand or try and amplify the message of the existing brand rather than trying to create a new one. It is different if you are a digital first brand like Zetland in Denmark where you have a very clear audience in mind to begin with. 

What is their secret sauce?

One important aspect of this is representation. Young people struggle with traditional brands because they don’t feel that the journalists and the newsrooms really understand what they’re interested in – both in terms of the agenda and in the way they like to consume media. For newsrooms that are primarily employing people age 45 and older, it’s very hard to speak authentically to a younger audience. Zetland’s founders were of that generation.

One of their recipes for success seems to have been their audio first concept. Because the data shows that young people like long stories – when they can listen to them. 

That’s another myth about young people: that they’re not interested in linear, they’re not interested in long form. Obviously, they binge on long television series, they binge on podcasts. But the kinds of podcasts they’re listening to are an accessible, easy mix of entertainment and information. There’s a lot of humour involved. And again, that works well with older people, too. Interestingly, podcast is becoming video. What we found in our research for the latest Digital News Report is that younger people watch podcast videos because they want to get closer to the host. Whereas older people say, it’s all about audio. And then you’ve got this third audience, which is people who just come across the podcast brands as short form video clips on TikTok and Instagram. So, podcasts are becoming kind of multi-platform brands with different appeal to younger and older people, depending on the platforms that are being used. 

Listening to you I get this feeling that about two thirds of today’s newsroom inhabitants are useless species because all they’ve ever wanted to do is write long stories. 

The other side of that coin is that the majority of traditional news organizations’ audiences are older and that they’re not dying anytime soon. Newsrooms will continue to serve those people, which is one of the things which makes it hard for them to change: Most of the revenue comes from older people. If they super serve young people, they’re likely to annoy these older groups. This is where personalization could come in: showing people who like these formats more of the video and showing people who don’t like them less of the video. When targeting younger audiences, there’s a bit around the news agenda, there’s a bit around formats, and there’s a bit around tone.

What about young people and news has surprised you most in all your research? 

That there is so much diversity in interests. Let’s take Sudan. That’s a country that gets very little mainstream media coverage, but on Instagram and TikTok there’s quite a lot of news about it, because it’s a completely horrific situation. You get a lot of surprises like that which challenge some of those myths that young people aren’t interested in anything outside their backyard or their friendship group.

Your creator report says that across the 24 countries you looked at, 85 percent of the creators were male. That looks like the opposite of increasing diversity. 

Yes, it is ironic that  that this new space that is full of creators is actually less diverse in some respects. That tells us quite a lot about who wants to get in front of the microphone. Political commentary is the one that is most dominated by men talking into their big microphones to other men, mainly consumed by older people. Then you’ve got the explanatory stuff, which is mainly created by young people and consumed by young people. And then there’s a whole load of more news adjacent creators who are in fashion or food and that’s much more gender mixed. There are some exceptions though. The Philippines has almost gender parity.

This interview was conducted as part the study “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.”  You can find more information and the full study here. The study was commissioned by Zentrum für Medienwissen of the Mediengruppe Wiener Zeitung, Co-Author was Jana Koch. The interview was published in full length here. 
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“Everyone should be required to do something to innovate every year”

For our study on Gen Z and news consumption for Mediengruppe Wiener Zeitung I interviewed the independent news creator Sophia Smith Galer. Sophia used to work for the BBC and Vox Media before going independent, she doesn’t only do journalism herself but also helps other journalists getting better at publishing on platforms like TikTok where younger audiences tend to be. Among other things, she serves on the Future Board of Mediahuis.  

Sophia, what do media organizations need to know if they want to reach young people today? 

Sophia Smith Galer: They need to understand young people’s viewing habits and reading habits and where they feel overserved and underserved. 

Is there something like “the younger audience”, or how would you segment it? 

Young people are not one monolith. Their habits vary depending on every demographic mix. Proper audience needs research would reveal those differences in detail. But it takes a lot of time of being on these platforms to figure out how to give audiences what they want. For example, young men can be reached more easily on YouTube, female audiences on Instagram. But ever since I left my BBC job, I never had the remit of reaching young people. My remit is just that I reach people.

Some media brands have experienced that: If they aim to reach young people, they discover they reach broader audiences.  

A lot of people will say that if they grow on platforms associated with young audiences like TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram, they will find growth, discoverability and awareness rising amongst audience far older. If you grow, you grow.

You worked for the BBC and Vice and turned to be an independent journalist creator in 2023. What do you know about the audiences you are reaching? 

To take Instagram where I’m the most active, my audiences are primarily in the 25 to 34 age bracket. That makes sense: I am 31 years old, a lot of creators tend to reach their own age group. But there are factors beyond one’s control. I’m British, but Americans are my biggest audience on Instagram, even though I spent just a few weeks of my life in America. So, it’s a great tool for discoverability across borders. 

You left the BBC in 2021 to get more creative freedom. These days you are advising Belgium-based Mediahuis on their Future Insights Board. What do you think about the ability of legacy media to advance with younger audiences?

A lot of the newsrooms that are making high-quality social media content on places like Instagram and TikTok are halfway there. That is if they have prioritized vertical video which is the growth engine right now. The big but is that publisher accounts simply do not have the reach or appeal that individual accounts have on these platforms. Audiences are drawn to influential expert individuals, and I think that more journalists should be occupying those roles and disseminating information themselves. 

So, it is key for legacy organizations to empower their individual journalists?

Definitely. Many journalists have to rely on a small, very underresourced video team in their newsroom that is in charge of the newsroom’s entire digital presence. That’s simply not how social media works. Social media is a peer-to-peer network of individuals. 

Do you see examples of organizations doing a good job at this?

In the marketing and commercial worlds, you’re seeing companies taking advantage of concepts like EGC – employee-generated content. Some offer staff incentives and training to be better ambassadors of their work. And to do that safely and freely and have fun with it and get benefits from it, staff need to have the freedom to post without being micromanaged. In fact, journalists could be very good at this because they are used to standing up for their work. A print journalist may appear on broadcast media to represent their work, for example. This is not different from representing your work on a platform like TikTok.

But even that is challenging for many journalists who have been trained to keep a low profile as individuals and disappear behind their reporting and their brand. 

A lot of journalists I have trained or surveyed say they don’t have the video skills, and they don’t have the time. But if they have too many obstacles to become ambassadors of their work, they will remain invisible online. And if they are invisible, their work will be invisible. That’s what really worries me, even more because a lot of the information on Instagram and TikTok is not good. It could really be improved if we had better storytellers there.

You just published a report on a sample of 526 UK journalists, revealing that the majority lacks a strong following on the platforms that matter with the public. They hang out among themselves on X when they could be reaching audiences on Insta, TikTok and YouTube. Is that because they don’t want to or because they don’t get the opportunity by their publishers? 

There are two groups: those who want to do this but haven’t been able to and those who really don’t want to do this. They do not think it is the job of a journalist today to amplify their work on social media. Obviously, I disagree with that personally. But I do come from a public service journalism background where it was really drummed into me that if I do journalism, the whole point is that as many people as physically possible can see it. If you’re not a public service journalist, maybe you can afford to not want to upskill yourself to put your journalism on social media.

Is it also because many journalists still expect people to come to them rather than the other way round?

They may possess quite hierarchical views of the newsroom. In the UK, we’re still seeing an environment where the output of the social media teams may not be seen as prestigious as the output of other teams. We need to stop talking about vertical video as innovation and start talking about it as platform risk mitigation. We need to make sure that we remain visible in an increasingly fragmenting online space where video is getting more important and where a lot of us are digitally homeless following the exodus from X.

What would you advise editors-in-chief to do? 

Newsrooms get the best results if they work with reporter talent who do original, distinctive journalism that is connected to the signature content of the newsroom and wins paying subscribers. This is a way to really amplify not only what you stand for, what you write or film or publish about, but what’s why you’re worth being paid. Identifying that talent and nurturing them and keeping hold of them is its own art, but there are plenty of frameworks from existing journalism structures to rely on. It isn’t reinventing the wheel, but it does take a bit of digital ambition and newsroom culture shift around what it means to be a reporter. It is not just you publish the story and that’s that, and you have nothing to do with the impact or discourse that is created around it. 

What are the major mistakes you have been observing in the media industry?

If a newsroom is making demands, but has not bothered to invest in resources and training for the staff to meet them. Also, in many newsrooms pioneering new formats or taking an interest in the sustainability of the organization does not figure in somebody’s career progression. What’s needed is a cultural shift: The entire workforce should have a vested interest in the future of the company that they’re working for. Everyone should be required to do something to innovate every year. But many senior journalists can’t see the crisis I can see because I am so chronically online. And for junior staff, it can be quite hard to translate that to those who have the power and decision-making abilities. Senior decision makers must become better listeners. This would retain junior staff because they would feel they were having a greater impact on the company’s future. Also, there has always been this church and state separation in newsrooms between commercial and editorial. But there is not a single content creator who divides church and state. They all have to be very editorially and commercially minded.

Is there anything on the content and format sides that could be improved?

 At the moment we’re seeing a lot of high-quality vertical video explainers that look identical to each other. I don’t think it’s sustainable because ultimately, you’re not building communities around your work. It’s within those communities that you’re going to do those important conversions that everyone in the business side of your newsroom is desperate to win over.

You have been very successful as a female creator. But there is a huge gender gap in the creator economy. In a study published by the Reuters Institute, 83 percent of the creators that were mentioned by those surveyed were male. One major reason seems to be that women shy away from online harassment – they are way more exposed to it than men.

That worries me, too. In the data set of my study, the highest profile women are individuals who have big jobs in TV. They’ve had strong backing from the traditional television industry and were famous pre-social media, they entered the race with a big following. As social media platforms may have become increasingly toxic or dangerous experiences, these women have a lot of institutional power and real-life resources and money that can help keep them safe. Whereas it’s the people who are yet to acquire these jobs and sort of fame who have to navigate this toxic environment without these resources. Many will not be able to make it because of how awful an experience they’re going to have online. 

You have embraced the AI age decisively by creating the Sophiana App that helps journalists to get proficient on TikTok. Could you explain your thinking behind this?

From the work I’ve done, I identified a clear need for a tool that could help journalists make vertical video more quickly and at a higher quality. And we know from research that news audiences are happier with journalists using AI tools if it keeps the human in the loop. Sophiana helps translate the written work into a TikTok friendly script that the journalist would have otherwise not been able to do at all or to the quality I expect. It includes a teleprompter so they can film it quickly. The tool centres the journalists’ work, helps them translate it, amplify it, keeping them front and centre and in total editorial control.

How do you think the AI environment will shape the way we all consume news? 

The most pressing change is the decline in website traffic. People are getting answers from speaking to AI agents, but where will the newsroom stand to make money in that new environment? I don’t see a lot of people who are worried about AI misinformation and AI slop. Audiences are really annoyed about all of that, that’s why they are on our side already. A bigger problem is audiences knowing who we are and how to support creative industries in this time of flux. They’re not going to know about it unless we talk to them about it.  

Data suggests social media usage peaked in 2022 and has been declining. Is this just a post-pandemic effect, or could there be more to it?

I think a lot of social media platforms have become less pleasant to use because of how much advertising is forced on people and how changes to what appears on a feed can put you off spending loads of time on it. I agree that there’s going to be a dip because people want to get back to real life. But I don’t think a decline in social media use is going to be an issue we have to deal with in the next three years minimum. 

This interview was conducted as part the study “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.”  You can find more information and the full study here. The study was commissioned by Zentrum für Medienwissen der Mediengruppe Wiener Zeitung, Co-Author was Jana Koch. The interview was published here.

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“Don’t try to be cool, because that is not your role”

For our study on Gen Z and news I interviewed Pierre Caulliez who has been leading the News Creator Exchange at WAN-IFRA and founded the Consultancy Yoof in London. By the time of our talk, Pierre was 23 years old, thus a pretty credible source on young people’s news consumption behavior. 

Pierre, what do media organizations need to know if they want to reach young people today? 

Pierre Caulliez: They need to know that it is a long-term game. It’s the wrong mindset to come in and say, ‘I want to see direct returns’. It is an investment into the future. It is showing the brand and the mission over the long run. 

Do you see ways to monetize young people with media products or experiences at all, or shouldn’t publishers even be trying?

18-year-olds didn’t pay for news 50 years ago and they won’t pay for it today either. I’m convinced that a portion of young people will pay for news once they get in a financial position and a stage in their lives where they need the news to understand the world and the decisions they make. Now with AI the role of journalism is more important than ever. And young people will see it with misinformation, with the fact that there is an infinite amount of content. News brands have a role as trusted sources of information, everyone will rely on checking whether an information is accurate. 

So, today’s young people are not really that different from previous young generations?

The main difference is that when you look at those who grew up in the 2000s as I did, there was not a lot of media choice. They grew up with Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, these big outlets that decided what the culture was. Now, there is a fragmentation of media. Everyone can become a news channel; everyone can do a TikTok. We are moving into a niche world where people consume niche content instead of mainstream content. These niches can be anything: certain sports or politics or a certain cinematic universe, for example the Marvel niche, which is seeing amazing loyalty. That drives the way they consume news and content and the loyalty they bring. 

But legacy media’s mission is to foster the democratic debate, not to cater to niche interests. 

The key to re-engage younger audiences around media is to recreate a relationship with them. Many young people don’t even know that these legacy media exist. If you ask five under 25s in the streets of London today: ‘give me five names of publishers’, I’m pretty sure they will struggle after number two or three.

Media managers often say ‘young people don’t read our stuff because they have such a short attention span’. Is that just an excuse?

Everyone now has a shorter attention span, because with all the content we are exposed to, we have less time to decide what’s relevant. But people are more likely to spend time with the topics that interest them most. If they were super interested in Formula One, they would listen to a podcast of two hours. It is about grabbing their attention and convincing them that something is relevant for them.

You have a new role with WAN-IFRA, building and leading the News Creator Exchange. Have you set yourself a goal?

We’re seeing more and more non-traditional news outlets that started out as creators and are now doing a very strong job at engaging young audiences. My mission with the News Creator Exchange is to bring these creators into the WAN-IFRA ecosystem and put them on an equal footing with editors and newsrooms. The aim is to create a shared space where editors and creators can sit together, compare how they work, learn from each other, and explore new ways of doing news storytelling. We’ll do that through different formats, workshops, exchanges, and collaborative sessions, and we have onboarded 150 news creators and digital-first outlets thanks to the support of the Google News Gap Project.

Imagine you have 15 minutes with a room full of legacy editors-in-chief. What would be your advice?

The biggest advice is: listen to your audience. Get these young users around the table, listen to them and to what they have to say about your brand. What do they watch, what do they find relevant? How do they find out about you? All this is important to know, not just to assume.

Frankly, it’s been a decade that pretty much every advisor I know has been telling newsrooms to listen to their audiences, and it doesn’t seem to happen. 

To be honest, I don’t understand why. Newsrooms should create open days where they make their journalists meet the audience, for example. It’s not that difficult. My second recommendation would be to build a human relationship with users. For example, 30, 40 years ago, there were some limits to how much we knew of celebrities. Now, because of how much they share about themselves, we know so much about their lifestyles. People identify with them because they share their vulnerabilities, they’re authentic. Some journalists are good at recreating this link and showing themselves as humans in the age of AI. And the third big advice is: do not try to be cool because that’s not your role. Some newsrooms are trying this, and I think it’s a disaster because that’s not their job to be making memes or being funny. Young people have thousands or millions of memes already on TikTok, so why would they go to this media for it? You got to keep your values straight. The formats you’re doing could adapt, but the journalism you do shouldn’t change. 

You are 23 years old yourself, but is there anything that surprises you when observing your generation consuming media?

I’m talking here as a pure Gen Z, not as a consultant, but I don’t see many people using Google anymore. It’s now about chatting with ChatGPT about anything, some do it two or three hours per day. I have a friend who is applying for jobs, and he recorded all his interviews to make him better at it. The new tools that AI offers will change the way we consume information. And one thing that scares me a lot is the trust we put into these tools.

What about social media? Data says we reached peak social media consumption in 2022. 

There is obviously a fatigue of consuming social media, consuming TikTok, but it’s not going to change the impact. Some young people I know are quite scared of how they consume these sorts of media for hours without even noticing. A lot of people are trying to quit social media, but they don’t manage because of the way these media are designed, they give us so much dopamine. 

Are there any missing conversations around young people and media consumption?

We are not discussing the event side of things enough. Events offer quite a good opportunity to familiarize young people with your brand. For example, a news brand in France sponsors a student congress that helps students to choose their course of study. When a person goes to a specific event, they are ten times more likely to remember the brand than if they were just seeing YouTube shorts of the same brand for 10 seconds. It creates value to build connections with different types of events across the life span of a person.

This interview was conducted as part the study “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.”  You can find more information and the full study here. The study was commissioned by Zentrum für Medienwissen der Mediengruppe Wiener Zeitung, Co-Author was Jana Koch. The interview was published here.

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Gen Z and News: How to engage young audiences with journalism – advice from Austria and the world

There are tons of assumptions out there about young people and news consumption – and many of them are NOT backed by evidence. In fact, young people trust media brands, if certain conditions are met. They are interested in news and have a long attention span, if something matters to them and they feel their needs matter to news brands. They are not only on TikTok, and they might trust creators more at times, but that happens often when regular media fail them.

Jana Koch of Mediengruppe Wiener Zeitung and I have researched the topic for many month and led dozens of qualitative interviews. Jana spoke to young people and Austrian editors, I interviewed international experts. The result was a 150-page-report: “Knapp daneben ist auch vorbei”. You can read the executive summary in English here.  Furthermore, I will publish the expert interviews here separately one by one (stay tuned).  You can download the complete report in German (an English version is in the making).  

 

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Broken Trust: Lessons from the Downfall of the Washington Post

The Washington Post is collapsing, and this is affecting people far beyond the media industry. On the one hand, this is because Washington itself has been shaken, not just an institution brimming with Pulitzer Prize winners that once brought down a president. Thanks to various movies, Watergate is a household name to younger people as well. On the other hand, the capitulation of the media company – it can hardly be called anything else in view of the layoffs of 300 journalists and the withdrawal (or dismissal) of CEO Will Lewis –, also shines a spotlight on the state of the industry. In the new, rapidly changing media world, no one is safe, not even the proud Washington Post. 

The case is both unique and generalizable. Unique because it is not only about the decline of a media company, but also about the moral decline of Jeff Bezos as a person. The Amazon founder bought the Post in 2013 for $250 million and held on to it despite several offers, his motivation for doing so never becoming entirely clear. It is generalizable because there are some lessons to be learned from the collapse of the Post. The layoffs are accompanied by a redirection of content, which one may not like but can understand given the circumstances.

But first, let’s look at the specifics. This is the Bezos who, during Trump’s first term in office, approved the Post‘s advertising slogan “Democracy dies in darkness” and gave the highly decorated then editor-in-chief Martin (Marty) Baron a free hand in exposing all the crimes and misdemeanours emanating from Washington. Baron, who has been publicly expressing his deep disappointment with Bezos for some time, described all this in detail in his book “Collision of Power,” published in 2023. The same Bezos then decreed shortly before the 2024 presidential election that the Post was not to publish any endorsement this time around. Given the timing, this was seen by many as kowtowing to candidate Donald Trump. Hundreds of thousands of readers subsequently quit as subscribers. Right after the announcement, the editorial team reported 250,000 cancellations, ten percent of the total digital subscribers.

Since then, Bezos has joined the ranks of those tech bosses who have curried favor with the new administration not only symbolically, but also in deeds. Whether this is done for purely business or possibly even ideological reasons will vary from case to case. One might kindly assume that Bezos is concerned with his fortune and not with a long-planned coup to undermine the fourth estate in the capital. But the fact that he had the opinion section trimmed toward “personal freedoms and free markets” shortly after Trump took office also indicates a change of course. In American newspapers, the opinion section is not headed by the editor-in-chief, but by an opinion editor, David Shipley, who subsequently resigned. Here, the specific contains something general: it is a risk that should not be underestimated to rely structurally on the moral integrity of a single person, billionaire or not. (This should also be taken to heart by those who see the future of journalism in the creator economy, by the way.) In other words, the “billionaire buys newspaper” business model can work as long as that billionaire remains true to his or her values.

As has been widely reported elsewhere, the management of the Washington Post has now imposed drastic cost-cutting measures: more than a third of all reporters have to go, the sports and literature sections are being completely shut down, and foreign reporting is being scaled back. A Ukraine correspondent received her notice of termination while reporting in Kiev. The tech journalist who was responsible for the coverage of Amazon also has to leave the company. The new focus will be on domestic and security policy. It’s back to basics in Washington. 

It’s to be expected that journalists around the world are reeling amidst these announcements. They mourn the decline from the celebrated, well-resourced competitor of the New York Times to a publication targeting the Washington home team. Once again, attractive job opportunities are disappearing. Sports reporters feel their days are numbered—quite a few top journalists began their careers on the sidelines of sports grounds. And those who dream of working as foreign correspondents or already do so are once again cringing. It has long been obvious that there is less demand for this type of reporter in a globally and digitally connected world than there was in the days when having a pair of eyes on the ground was essential for publications with a journalistic reputation.

However, the WaPo‘s return to its core values can also be interpreted as a long overdue step. In an information and communication world where content is increasingly brought to light by AI searches, every media company must find its own special place, making itself indispensable and distinctive. What department stores have been experiencing for decades is now also coming to the media industry: the concept of a full-range retailer no longer works. Relying solely on a glorious past, a strong brand, and brilliant journalists is not enough. The Washington Post has reacted rather late to this development. But at least it is doing so. Media organizations that are less strict with their balance sheets still have this painful process ahead of them. Where the restructuring is delayed for too long, there may eventually be nothing left to save.

You can already hear the critics shouting: “But The New York Times…” Yes, in the same week that the Washington Post announced its downsizing plans, its New York rival published strong figures. But the management there has done a number of things right, which is now benefiting it in a winner-takes-all economy. Unlike the Washington Post, it has not relied solely on its strong journalism. It is a painful truth for journalists that the material for which they sometimes risk their lives is only one component of a bundle that people are willing to pay for. Millions of people today subscribe to the NYT not (only) because of its award-winning journalism, but because of the recipes, puzzles, and product reviews. With a clever internationalization strategy in the form of affordable subscriptions for customers outside the US, it understood earlier than its competitors how to build global loyalty. There is a certain irony in this: in retail, Amazon, as the remaining full-range retailer, has pushed countless others out of the market. Similarly, the New York Times is valued by educated classes worldwide as a powerhouse of media expertise that also helps you cook. There is no need for a second global player that now also has the misfortune of being associated in its name with an unreliable world power and its vassals. 

However, it is not only the Times that is growing. In light of the crisis at the Washington Post, Charlotte Tobitt, a journalist at the British Press Gazette, examined the digital strategies of five successful American media companies. What they all have in common is that they have also established themselves in fields beyond pure journalism, whether it be the development of special digital products or events. This shows growth is possible in these market conditions. But it requires a strategy that goes beyond news journalism.

It is an open secret that strong investigative stories, such as those that established the Post‘s reputation, are good to cultivate ones image. However, because they are expensive to produce, most companies can only afford a handful of them in a certain period. But if you want to attract loyal media users, you need to get them to visit your site as often and for as long as possible. This is more successful with content that is more relevant to the lives of the specific target audience. Data analysts in many newsrooms know that the journalism that wins awards is often not the journalism that scores with the audience—and vice versa. 

In the case of the Washington Post, the concept of investigative strength had even worked in the early Trump years: the many Trump critics in the capital were well served. During Joe Biden’s presidency, however, the connection to this readership weakened. Many no longer knew why they should subscribe to the Post of all newspapers. At the same time, successful digital start-ups such as Politico had challenged the newspaper’s unique selling point as a Washington insider. It was no longer necessary to subscribe to the Post to stay informed about events within the Beltway. According to official statements, the Post now wants to reclaim this territory.

In the age of AI, every company must also consider which field it wants to play in in the future. As understandable as the outrage over the discontinuation of the sports section is, reporting on results or detailed reports on the successes and failures of various teams can confidently be left to AI. For example, the BBC is already successfully using AI-automated audio commentary in regional sports—even in local accents. In the future, sports reporting will have to focus on personalities, lifestyle, and well-told stories. Incidentally, the New York Times also took the lead in this area when it acquired the appropriately positioned media brand The Athletic in 2022 – for more than twice the price Bezos once paid for the Post.

The same will become apparent in other areas of reporting: simply being there is no longer enough. Those who report internationally must do so better or differently than The New York Times, for example, with a view to a specific audience. Those who recommend books need a strong community or personal brands with extremely high credibility around them. Those who offer service or explanatory journalism should take the ChatGPT test: they must clearly exceed the level of chatbots. Media brands have a good chance of asserting themselves in the flood of artificially generated content if they sharpen their profile and build and maintain credibility with strong content or personalities.

Incidentally, what Jeff D’Onofrio, the acting CEO and former CFO of the Post, said after Lewis’s departure is not enough. He announced that the company wanted to use data to decide what customers needed. Data is indeed indispensable for steering and adjusting the offerings. However, what is even more important are values. This is especially true for media companies that are committed to democracy, as the Washington Posthas long been. Those who betray their value proposition to customers should not be surprised when their community implodes. The future of journalism is built on trusting, loyal relationships. The Washington Post has a long, hard road ahead of it.

This column was published in German by Medieninsider on 10 February 2026. It was translated with DeepL and edited by the author.   

 

 

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Nieman Lab Prediction 2026: Editors will start tackling the 5% challenge – and it won’t be fun (at first)

The advances of generative AI have put those in charge of newsrooms on an emotional rollercoaster. While 2023 and 2024 were the years of reckless experimentation (“Hey, look what these models can do!”), in 2025, AI realism took over. Great ideas turned out to be hard to implement, costly, or solutions looking for problems (“Nice, but it’s not serving anyone!”). Putting strategy back into AI development became key.

This is why 2026 is likely to become the dip of the ride. Because now, the strategy needs to be filled with life. And while editors at media conferences widely agree that AI will force newsrooms to focus on unique, original journalism and experiences that create value for their audiences and deepen customer connections, some detailed data analysis will make many of them feel queasy. Because the result will often be not that different from what an editor recently revealed at an industry gathering: Only 5% of a subset of his brand’s content was original journalism. The subtext was clear, of course: The rest could have been done by an AI. Welcome to the 5% challenge.

Expect many newsroom leaders to become busy next year figuring out what exactly makes their brand stand out in the emerging sea of content. And even harder: finding a way to scale the 5% (or maybe 20%) to proportions that guarantee their journalism’s survival. Because let’s face it, the era of the web has been the age of copy-and-paste journalism. And this is exactly what (once) younger journalists have been raised to do in the past 20 years or so. Sitting behind the screen all day and competing for reach was the job. The word “reporting” — picking up stories from the streets by looking at things and talking to people, face-to-face or on the phone — was converted into the phrase “reporting on the ground,” which sounded as if leaving the comfort of the office was an award-worthy niche discipline.

For leaders, doing all of this will involve conveying some hard truths to many newsroom inhabitants: telling them that their daily work has to change — and fast. Converting agency copy into a snappy story — the AI has already done it. Doing some service journalism because customers safely clicked on it — the chatbot will have been there already. Upselling subscriptions with branded recipes — maybe, as long as ChatGPT still spoils the dish with hallucinations. Unfortunately, “stop doing” is among the hardest disciplines for any kind of enterprise. Because other than running exciting experiments and excelling in the innovation department, stopping routines and common practices is neither sexy nor does it bring about career advantages. To the contrary, it means robbing people of things they love to do, or are at least proficient in. And it takes away the status and power that was attached to practicing them. Speaking of rollercoasters, there will be some uncomfortable circles at the bottom of this.

There are four areas where media brands can scale the human-made part of their journalism

But here comes the uplifting part: Focusing one’s journalism on “the real thing” (again) will be fun — for seasoned hacks and creator-type newcomers alike. And it can also help bridge the newsroom generation gap. While younger colleagues can learn from the more experienced ones research and source-building skills for access and investigations (including persistence and picking up a phone), older ones will profit from everything that the Insta-and-Spotify generation can bring to the desk, like video, podcasting, data research, and brand-building competencies.

There are four areas in particular where media brands can scale the human-made part of their journalism: First, with strong personal brands who will play out their authenticity and humanness to connect with audiences (plenty has been published about news creators in 2025). Second, with deep expertise in niche areas that AI-generated content cannot provide because it is prone to converge around the average. Third, with investigations that make news consumers proud of “their” news brand. And fourth, with strong local journalism that is deeply rooted in its communities — in most cases, AI won’t go there. Creators who understand their formats and their stuff can figure in all of these areas, of course.

The sizable rest can safely be left to the workings of AI, where agents will do a much faster, more targeted, and personalized job than humans could have done, provided humans do the necessary prep work for accuracy. Markus Franz, chief technology officer of Munich-based Ippen Group, predicts that with agentic AI, the current “human in the loop” principle will be replaced with a “human on the loop” approach in the future that helps with scalability.

In all of these scenarios, journalism jobs will move into two quite different directions. One set of roles will lean toward the more techie side. They will need to shape the new AI-mediated world of journalism, ensure scalability that adheres to the quality standards of journalism, and build compelling products for customers that make them connect directly with the brand. On the other side, we will see the new “old-style” journalists who do everything to solicit exclusive information and/or establish themselves as personal brands. Talent will most likely have to pick sides early on, and it is essential that journalism education reflects and fosters this. As soon as everyone has settled into their new seats, the rollercoaster can go on its next climb.

This prediction was published with Harvard University’s Nieman Lab on December 16, 2025.

 

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AI Strategy Beats Shiny Objects