Tag: #news brand

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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.