“It’s a matter of age”: Four dimensions of youths’ news consumption

Abstract

News media in Switzerland are confronted with the challenge of not reaching young people, as youth-specific news platforms and formats are not used by the target group. Our study aims to determine how and where young people can be reached with news. It uses a mixed methods approach to analyze the expectations of young people towards news content and formats and to determine their news consumption patterns. The results show that young people’s news consumption is characterized by four dimensions: 1. duration and times of consumption, 2. news consumption habits and behavior, 3. restrictions, 4. media literacy. The significance of these dimensions varies between three age groups determined through the study. The news consumption of the 12-to-14 year-olds is strongly restricted by parents and school. This group consumes news mainly through media available at home. In the group of 15- to-17 year-olds, parental influence and restrictions decrease, while peer influence increases. This age group spends a lot of time on social media platforms where young people stumble upon news rather accidentally. Between 18 and 20 years of age, news consumption stabilizes, and individual patterns emerge. This age group accesses news via selected apps and social media channels. Young people in Switzerland prefer visual formats like pictures, videos, and memes. When scrolling through social media platforms, they come across news content which arouses their interest in certain information and leads them to search for it on media websites. Swiss Youth wants to be informed about relevant news or topics that are “in vogue”.

Like, Comment, and Share on TikTok: Exploring the Effect of Sentiment and Second-Person View on the User Engagement with TikTok News Videos

“…Meanwhile, they need to make TikTok news videos that young people will not find boring. Plausible strategies include creating concise news videos, using understandable language to interpret the news, and increasing the interaction with the audience (Klopfenstein Frei et al, 2022; Marchi, 2012; Oeldorf-Hirsch & Srinivasan, 2022). Traditional news values like quality and truth are still solid for young news users.…”

What feels like news? Young people’s perceptions of news on Instagram

“…The cultural pervasiveness of such values means that directly posing the question how users would define news runs the risk of resulting in socially desirable answers that reproduce such profession-driven discourse, conveying what users recognize rather than what they experience as news (cf. Klopfenstein Frei et al, 2022). This study therefore starts from the actual content that young people use by employing the walk-through method (Light et al, 2018) to uncover conceptualizations of news.…”

“…These feature a personalized array of posts by accounts that users do not (yet) follow, based on trending content and prior browsing behavior (Boczkowski et al, 2018;Goyanes and Demeter, 2022). Second, Instagram's visual nature, with limited space for captions and hyperlinks, encourages the presentation and consumption of news in novel formats, such as memes, infographics or short explainer videos (Klopfenstein Frei et al, 2022;Vázquez-Herrero, 2019). Finally, Instagram makes no hierarchical distinctions between different sources or genres, but blends diverse information environments into one information stream (Swart et al, 2017b;Anter and Kümpel, 2023).…”

“…Prior studies have primarily focused on users' cognitive assessments of what content they recognize as matching classic conceptualization of news as a cultural form (Craft et al, 2016;Klopfenstein Frei et al, 2022). In this context, Edgerly and Vraga (2020a) proposed the concept of 'news-ness'the extent to which audiences perceive specific media content as newsto do justice to the gradual nature of how people determine the degree to which they consider specific content news-like.…”

Choosing to Become a Citizen Journalist: The Experiences of Malaysian Youth

“…Young people also prefer compact news that catered to their interests, specific motivations and more flexible gatekeeping practices that allows more interaction on the platform itself. Therefore, younger members of the society are keener to instructiveness and personalization of news based on topics that appeal to the generation (Klopfenstein Frei, Wyss, Gnach, & Weber, 2022;Aharoni, Kligler-Vilenchik, & Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2021).…”