FEATURE1 February 2023
Need to know: Young people’s perceptions of news are changing
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Increased scepticism and awareness of self care are shaping how young people think about news in three different countries, qual commissioned by the Reuters Institute has found. By Katie McQuater
In 1981, French sociologist Jean Baudrillard wrote: “We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”
The information economy has exploded since the advent of social media. No longer are audiences solely reliant on traditional news sources such as newspapers and TV – the media landscape has become fragmented, with multiple potential sources of information, from TikTok to podcasts.
Whether this influx of information has resulted in less meaning is up for debate, and worthy of its own analysis. What is clear, however, is that within this busy media environment – once you factor in the rise of misinformation, growing awareness of wellbeing and a recognition of the need for finely tuned critical thinking – you have patterns of news consumption that look quite different from how they did a few years ago, particularly for younger people.
For the past decade, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism ...
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1 Comment
Nick Drew
2 months ago
I think one can't look at external factors in isolation in these behaviour shifts - one can't solely pin the declining trust in mainstream media brands on 'the internet' or 'social media', for example. Taken as a whole, many of the formerly mainstream news brands have done very well at torpedoing their own brand reputation. It's hard to believe, but the Daily Mail was at one point a respected newspaper, trusted as much as The Times, rather than gathering point for all the university-educated right-wing wingnuts within the media establishment; The Times used to be *the* gold standard for mainstream news reporting, presenting a sober, thoughtful and above all instructive view on what was happening in the world. Even the BBC has in recent years seen - largely through its own misguided efforts to provide 'balance' on factually proven topics and a political lens on decisions such as "is austerity a good thing" - its reputation severely eroded. So while social media and other 'non-aligned' news sources have risen in importance for younger generations, on the other side of the scales has been an active degradation of the inviolability of established news brands which has allowed that rise in the role of social media and other news sources. Honestly, at this point those of us seeing (for example) the BBC as somehow a source apart for news are mainly clinging on wistfully to a prior output that doesn't really exist any more...
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