According to the recent Reuters Digital News Report, young people are not into the news. But that’s not completely accurate, Kassy Cho, journalist, audience strategist, founder, and editor-in-chief at Almost in Taiwan, said during the INMA World Congress of News Media in London.

Young people do want news — it’s just not being delivered to them in the way that makes sense to them.

“If you can’t find young people, you are not meeting them where they are,” Cho said.

In Asia, where a survey by Almost shows there is high level of mistrust in news, 26.9% of young people (11-18 years) consumed news on a daily basis, mostly through social media. About 87% of these got their news from Instagram.

It was also claimed that, according to Cho, young people were not interested in hard topics. However, they were interested in serious topics like women’s rights, politics, human rights, and so on: “We can’t expect them to immediately understand complex issues.”

News outlets should be investing in young audiences, Cho said. While traditional media desires to engage with young people, it resists change.

“That’s how we end up being on a TV show on the Internet that nobody wants to watch,” Cho said. “Media has been slow to adapt, we should be innovating instead.”

Combatting negativity bias

Discussing negativity bias as one of the leading causes for audience disengagement, Jodie Jackson, director at News Literacy Lab, author, and TEDX speaker, said that it is also a key contributor to misinformed world view.

Prioritising stories of problems, failure, disaster, violence, and conflict without providing any meaningful coverage on solutions and progress does not mirror reality, it actually distorts it, Jackson said: “It creates a huge sense of urgency with no sense of agency.” 

Explaining the two types of engagement based on negativity bias, Jackson said the first one is unconscious disengagement, which made people desensitised and they stopped caring. The second one was far more deliberate, as news made them feel bad, so they actively disengaged.

“To re-engage, we need a new story, serious report on solutions, not lighthearted, uplifting stories but hard hitting journalism that investigates progress and helps understand how problems are being actively solved,” Jackson said.

Engaging news avoiders

Ben Haywood, chief product officer at Stuff in New Zealand, said 75% of the people in the country are avoiding news occasionally because they are using fewer sources of news and spending less time with them. This was because they found news boring, repetitive, and bad for their mental health.

“We understood how our news is making them feel, launched on our Web site sentiment tracker, where readers can choose emotion on how the story is making them feel,” Haywood said. “A free text was also given on why they felt that.”

Haywood emphasised that stories of resilience made them feel better, that justice motivated them.

To engage news avoiders, Almost did a series on explaining serious topics, explainers, and TikTok videos to provide more context, Cho said: “Explainers do not get much likes but a lot of shares and saves, which means treating it as a source to send and look at it later.”

Serious topics in the explainers require to be spoken more seriously, Cho said. The tone of content delivery should match the content itself.

“We speak in conversational ways as it’s more personal,” Cho said. “TikTok has fast speakers because young people have short attention spans.”

Per the BBC report of World Service Survey, 64% of people under 35 years of age wanted the news to report on solutions and was the top content request. This helps build trust between newsrooms and audiences, Jackson said. Also, readers who engaged in solutions journalism read more articles from the same organisation and enhanced willingness to pay for content.

“Solution journalism is not against reporting problems, but also looking beyond problems and what is being done about them,” Jackson said, adding this is not about ignoring problems but is instead focused on how we psychologically resourced ourselves to deal with them better.

“Solutions journalism is no longer a niche; it is a necessity in modern news reporting,” Jackson said.

On whether make-feel-better stories performed better, Haywood said that there was no clear correlation:

“A good analysis from a local correspondent on a story performs better, has a positive response. It need not be a kitten and sports story that makes people happy. The case is not leading people down the path of division.”

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