A few days ago, the Reuters Institute published its new report on young people and news. It brings together over a decade of Digital News Report data, surveys across up to 48 markets, qualitative studies, and longitudinal tracking into one picture of where the industry stands with young audiences.

I want to walk you through the findings that matter most to me.

The authority gap

First, the number everyone will quote: On social and video networks, young people say they pay more attention to individual news creators than to traditional news brands: 51% versus 39%. Among those 55 and older, the figures are essentially reversed.

This is the headline finding, and it will appear in a lot of presentations this year. But the raw number is less interesting to me than what it represents: a generational inversion of editorial authority.

For younger audiences, the person has replaced the institution as the primary carrier of trust. That’s not a platform problem. That’s a fundamental shift in how journalism earns its credibility.

Creators and journalists are not the same thing. The difference in editorial standards, accountability structures, and revenue models is real. But what the data shows is young audiences are not making that distinction the way older audiences do. They’re following people they trust, regardless the institutional label behind them. 

How newsrooms respond to that reality is one of the defining questions. I am convinced there are different possible answers, but more on this later. 

Second: the brand recall crisis. When people encounter news on social and video platforms, they tend to be there for other reasons, and they are less likely to remember which news brand produced the content.

Think about that for a moment: Journalism is being consumed, but the connection between the content and its source is dissolving.

Young audiences aren’t rejecting journalism, they’re just not attaching it to the institutions behind it. This is the direct consequence of a decade of platform-first distribution strategies. Publishers pushed content out, platforms kept the audience relationship, and brands got flattened in the process.

The question of how to rebuild direct relationships with young audiences — genuinely direct, not just algorithmic reach — is one of the hardest problems in the business. And once again, one answer might be to work with voices young people already trust.

What brings us to the next point: what young audiences actually want — and how badly the industry has misread it. The report describes young people’s appetite for audio and visual formats as coming with a desire for the intimacy and authenticity of personality-led content.

I want to underline that word: intimacy. Not virality. Not scale. Intimacy. This is exactly what I mean when I talk about humility, about the particular quality of connection that happens when a journalist or creator shows up not as a brand but as a person who genuinely cares about what they’re covering. 

Young audiences are remarkably good at detecting the difference. They can tell when someone is performing engagement versus actually giving a damn. And they vote with their attention accordingly.

The industry has spent years trying to crack the young audience problem with formats: shorter videos, more TikToks, better thumbnails. The data suggests the problem was never really about format. It was about relationships.

Neither side wins alone

The report doesn’t romanticize the creator side either. Youth-oriented outlets and independent journalists, it notes, often benefit from an intuitive grasp of platform storytelling and audience norms, but they face persistent revenue constraints and frequently depend on the original reporting of legacy organisations.

Fact is: Both sides can learn from each other. The interesting question is what that collaboration actually looks like in practice. There is no single answer. Newsrooms are finding different ways to navigate this — same for creators and creator journalists.

If you’d like to subscribe to my bi-weekly newsletter, INMA members can do so here.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .