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.
OXFORD – Depending on where you get your news, your view of how the impeachment inquiry into US President Donald Trump is unfolding may be very different from that of your friends, relatives, or neighbors. You may also think that any version of the story that conflicts with yours is simply untrue. This lack of consensus on basic facts – largely a byproduct of social media – carries serious risks, and not nearly enough is being done to address it.
In recent years, the need to improve “media literacy” has become a favorite exhortation of those seeking to combat misinformation in the digital age, especially those who would prefer to do so without tightening regulation of tech giants like Facebook and Google. If people had enough media savvy, the logic goes, they would be able to separate the wheat from the chaff, and quality journalism would prevail.
There is some truth to this. Just as it is dangerous to drive in a place where you don’t know the traffic laws, navigating the new digital-media environment safely – avoiding not only “fake news,” but also threats like online harassment, nonconsensual (“revenge”) porn, and hate speech – requires knowledge and awareness. Robust efforts to improve media literacy globally are thus crucial. Free, credible, and independent news media are a pillar of any functioning democracy, essential to enable voters to make informed decisions and to hold elected leaders accountable. Given this, media literacy must be pursued within a broader campaign to improve democratic literacy.
Since its invention in ancient Greece more than 2,500 years ago, democracy has depended on rules and institutions that strike a balance between participation and power. If the point was simply to enable everyone to speak up, platforms like Facebook and Twitter would be the pinnacle of democracy, and popular movements like the 2011 Arab Spring would naturally produce functioning governments.
Instead, the objective is to create a system of governance in which elected leaders bring to bear their knowledge and experience, in order to advance the interests of the people. The rule of law and the separation of powers, guaranteed by a system of checks and balances, are vital to the functioning of such a system. In short, mobilization means little without institutionalization.
And yet, today, public institutions are suffering from the same lack of trust as news media. To some extent, this is warranted: many governments have failed to meet their citizens’ needs, and corruption is rampant. This has fueled rising skepticism toward democratic institutions, with people often preferring ostensibly more egalitarian online platforms, where everyone’s voice can be heard.
The problem is that such platforms lack the checks and balances that informed decision-making demands. And, contrary to the early expectations of some Internet pioneers, those checks and balances will not emerge organically. On the contrary, tech companies’ algorithm-driven business models all but preclude them, because they amplify voices according to clicks and likes, not value or veracity.
Populist politicians have taken advantage of the lack of checks and balances to obtain power, which they often use to please their supporters, ignoring the needs of opponents or minority groups. This type of majority rule looks a lot like mob rule, with populist leaders trying to overrule legislatures and courts to fulfill the desires – often shaped by lies and propaganda – of their constituents. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s recent attempt to suspend Parliament, in order minimize its ability to prevent a no-deal Brexit, is a case in point.
In a democracy, all people must be able to trust their leaders to uphold their rights and protect their basic interests, regardless of whom they voted for. They should be able to go about their daily lives, confident that public officials will dedicate their time and energy to making informed decisions – and that those who don’t will be checked and balanced by the rest. Credible independent media support this process.
In Johnson’s case, the judiciary fulfilled its duty to check the executive. But with every assault on democratic institutions, accountability is weakened, people become more disillusioned, and the legitimacy of the system declines. Over time, this reduces the incentive for talented people to work in fields like journalism and politics, eroding their effectiveness and legitimacy further.
Breaking this vicious circle requires the rapid expansion of media and democratic literacy, including how the system works and who owns and shapes it. And yet, as a forthcoming study by the Council of Europe’s Expert Committee on Quality Journalism in the Digital Age (on which I served) shows, most existing media-literacy programs are limited to teaching schoolchildren how to use digital platforms and understand news content. Very few target older people (who are most in need), explain who controls media and digital infrastructure, or teach the mechanisms of algorithmic choice.
Democracies all over the world are enduring a stress test. If they are to pass, their institutional underpinnings must be reinforced. That requires, first and foremost, an understanding of what those underpinnings are, why they matter, and who is trying to dismantle them.
This commentary was published by Project Syndicate on November 28, 2019