Reuters Institute : Understanding young news audiences at a time of rapid change

For more than a decade, the Reuters Institute Digital News Report has documented fundamental shifts in how young people (defined in this report as those aged 18–24) interact with and think about news during a period of significant technological, media, and political transformation. As ‘social natives’, this demographic is moving away from traditional news media like television, print, and even news websites, gravitating instead towards a social-first and audiovisual-heavy media diet, where news is one type of content consumed among many.

While much has been said about the perceived lack of news engagement among younger people, our research also documents a greater sense of alienation among this segment of the public, some of whom find traditional news irrelevant, difficult to understand, or unfairly biased against their demographic. Mismatches between journalistic output and the expectations of young audiences highlight the need for newsrooms to examine both the question of how to reach young people where they are and, equally important, how to do so with news they find relevant, engaging, and ultimately worth their attention. Meeting the needs of this segment is crucial, not just for the current stability of the journalism industry, but also for the future of democratic societies as young individuals transition through adulthood (Røsok-Dahl and Ihlebæk 2024).

In this report we bring together evidence from over a decade of Reuters Institute research to shed light on young audiences today. Understanding generational shifts is vital for the financial sustainability of the news industry, which depends on a pipeline of younger consumers who will keep coming back to news. It also matters for the democratic health of our societies, which requires individual citizens, including young people, to be informed and collectively share a basic understanding of the world. Research consistently shows that news consumption boosts political participation, improves knowledge of current affairs, and improves resilience to misinformation, among other benefits (e.g. Altay et al. 2023; Mont’Alverne et al. 2024; Oser and Boulianne 2020).

This report has two main objectives. The first is to map out key behavioural and attitudinal trends among young members of the public, shedding light on key differences and changes in how they consume and relate to news. The story of the past ten years is not the move away from traditional media like television and newspapers. By 2015 young people had either already moved away from these as news sources or, in most cases, never used them in the first place. Instead, the story is about the move away from news websites as a source of news to social media and other forms of ‘distributed’ access. As we will show, this has emerged hand-in-hand with somewhat diverging interests, expectations, and needs when it comes to journalism – a different understanding of what news is and should be.

Second, we wish to illuminate what young people are proactively doing around news, not just what they are not doing compared to older groups. The data are clear that young people consume a plethora of media and information, often in more diverse and complex ways. In an increasingly fragmented social media universe – six online networks (Newman et al. 2025b) now reach more than 10% weekly with news content, compared with just two a decade ago – we see that young people tend to use different but also more platforms. Their growing appetite for audio and visual formats comes with a desire for the intimacy and authenticity of personality-led content. They also tend to be at the forefront of experimentation with new technologies, such as AI, and more open to its use by journalists. We highlight some of these opportunities and showcase examples of how publishers, large and small, are trying to meet these audiences where they are.

Key Findings

Based on secondary analysis of Reuters Institute research, we present the following key findings that summarise young people’s news attitudes and behaviours, and how they have changed.

• Young people (aged 18–24) are now clearly social-first rather than online-first when it comes to news. Ten years ago in 2015, young people’s main way of accessing news was through online news websites and apps of publishers. Today, their main source is social media.
• The 18–24s have embraced audiovisual platforms. They now rely on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube for news, overtaking Facebook, which was the dominant platform ten years ago.
• On social and video networks, young people say they pay more attention to individual news creators (51%) than to traditional news brands (39%), in contrast with those 55 and older, who say they pay more attention to the news media.
• More broadly, young people are more likely than older groups to prefer to listen to or to watch news online – although the preference for reading is still ahead in most markets for now. They also consume more podcasts than older people, but news podcasts specifically are less of a driver than for older people.
• Young people are consuming news less frequently than older people. Around two thirds (64%) of 18–24s consume news on a daily basis, compared with 87% of people 55 and over. This is partly because social-led news consumption is less intentional and more incidental.
• Young people are also less interested in news. Just one third (35%) of 18–24s compared with 52% of those 55+ say they are ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ interested in news in 2025. Young people are less interested in topics like politics and are relatively more interested in fun and entertaining content. Young men are comparatively more interested in science and technology, and young women in mental health news.
• Around four in ten (42%) young people say they ‘sometimes’ or ‘often’ avoid the news – but this is similar to other age groups. All age groups cite the depressing nature of news as the main reason, but young people are relatively more likely to say news doesn’t seem relevant to them or they find it difficult to understand.
• People aged 18–24 are more comfortable with AI, using chatbots for news more often and in more elaborate ways than older people. Around 15% are using AI to access news weekly compared with just 3% of those 55 and over. They also hold more positive attitudes towards AI-assisted journalism and are more likely to say they use AI to help navigate and simplify complex news stories.
• Young people do not think in fundamentally different ways about how well the news media are performing compared with the older age groups – but there are differences of degree. Across age groups, views on the amount and fairness of news coverage tend to be positive, although 18–24s are slightly more likely to think they are not covered enough and covered ‘unfairly’.
• Most people across generations favour the idea of impartial news, but young people more often (32% compared with 19% of those 55+) think it ‘makes no sense for news outlets to be neutral on certain issues’, such as climate change or racism.
• Young people have wide-ranging but broadly similar ‘user needs’ when it comes to news, and average differences in trust in news by age are also smaller than often assumed – nine percentage points (pp) lower among 18–24s (37%) than 55 and overs in 2025.