Young people don’t read news? Research from Newsworks suggests otherwise
Youth engagement with news brands is significantly under-reported, according to a study from Newsworks, the marketing body for national news publishers.
The report, titled Youth, found that, for 15- to 29-year-olds, nine in 10 read news in some form online, with nearly three-quarters (72%) reading premium news brands.
The findings were based on a passive dataset, collected by Ipsos and analysed by Newsworks in conjunction with market research company Colourtext, of the “clickstream record” of 993 nationally representative young people across every website they visited and app they used during November 2023.
The dataset tracked click-by-click and second-by-second activities of all digital interactions by the cohort studied, inclusive of reading news, shopping and social media — even watching pornography.
It found that, on average, the young adult demographic interacts with six articles every day.
Behaviour and perception don’t align
However, in a survey of 1,500 Brits in the same 15-29 age bracket conducted as part of Youth, just 16% claimed to read news brands online — showing a discrepancy between real and perceived consumer habits.
The myth that young people don’t consume news is strong to the point that while 67% of participants said news is “important” to them personally, only 51% said they believe news is as important to their peers.
Heather Dansie, Newsworks’ insight director and co-author of the study, told The Media Leader that discrepancies of these types are common when trying to understand consumer behaviour through surveys.
“Recall is always difficult,” she said of survey questions asking about personal behaviours. She added: “That’s why we took a holistic approach to this study to look at their behaviour and ask about their attitudes.”
When comparing digital news consumption to consumption of other content online, news was found to rank third in terms of overall audience reach (88%), behind “life admin” such as email and banking (99%) and social media and messaging (96%).
“Think that young people don’t read news brands?” asked Newsworks CEO Jo Allan. “Well, our groundbreaking research proves they do.”
Allan remarked that Newsworks has found “not only is news brand readership a fundamental part of young people’s lives, but it also plays a highly influential one.”
She continued: “In an era of fake news — which impacts young people particularly — readers place huge respect and value in news journalism and trust the content they see. For advertisers, that trust extends to product reviews, editorial content, as well as advertising.”
Notably for advertisers, Newsworks also found that 68% of news brand readers went to a retail site immediately after reading news, implying news’ potential importance in directly or indirectly influencing shopping behaviour online.
News interest spans ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ categories
Young consumers’ interest in news was found to span both the “hard” (politics, economy, war etc) and “soft” (celebrity, sport, entertainment) categories of news brand output.
“Soft” news such as celebrity gossip is widely viewed by brands as more brand-safe than news about more controversial subjects, such as politics and war. However, studies this autumn from Stagwell and Teads together with Lumen have found that advertising adjacent to news brands is equally effective regardless of which stories the ad shows up against.
Dansie commented that, for young audiences, “soft news does resonate, but so does hard news”.
She explained that the research uncovered a “very equal” interest in hard and soft news content, but acknowledged that “everybody is reading different styles of news” within those broad categories.
For example, some may prefer to interact with opinion and commentary more than straight reporting on various subjects, or video content versus written content.
Dansie suggested that publishers’ first-party data is thus useful to help them and their advertising clients drive more granular understanding of their audiences, what they are most interested in and the format in which they can best be reached.
Older readers more engaged
The 15-29 cohort encompasses a broad range of individuals across various life milestones, from attending school to starting a family.
It’s no surprise to Dansie that the study therefore found that older members of the cohort generally say they are more interested in news.
Indeed, 25- to 29-year-olds are more likely to engage with news at least weekly (88%) and share news several times a week (79%) than 15- to 19-year-olds (69% and 64% respectively).
But, as Dansie noted, the study importantly demonstrates that a strong majority of even 15- to 19-year-olds are interested in and interacting with news brands.
“For this generation, there are so many touchpoints for people to access news in so many different ways,” she said. Because news gets shared on social platforms or via other non-traditional media channels used by teens and children, “people are adopting news [consumption] earlier than probably ever before”.
“Young people are engaged with the news,” Dansie concluded. “Engagement is higher than I think it’s commonly perceived.”