Navigating the generational news gap

The question for journalism is not how to lure young people back to the old habits. It is whether the new habits can sustain the informed citizenry that democracy requires.”

Stuart N. Brotman, Digital Media Laureate at The Media Institute

A recent report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism lands like a dispatch from two parallel universes. One universe is populated by Americans 55 and older, who still reach for television, newspaper websites and the morning broadcasts. The other is inhabited by 18-to-24-year-olds who have never really lived in the first universe at all and have no plans to visit.

The report draws on a decade of Reuters Institute research to document what many in the news industry have feared but few have fully reckoned with: the pipeline is broken. 

The habits that sustained journalism's business model for a century, such as appointment viewing, daily subscriptions and the ritual of the front page, are the habits of people who are aging out of the audience. The generation replacing them has built an entirely different relationship with news, one that the industry is only beginning to understand.

The numbers tell a stark story. In 2015, young people said their main sources of news were websites and apps. By 2025, it was social media. Nearly three-quarters of 18-to-24-year-olds (73%) watched a short-form news video in the past week, much of it on TikTok and Instagram, compared with 60% of those 55 and over. Podcasts, which barely existed as a news format a decade ago, are now consumed monthly by 59% of young adults vs. just 24% of older audiences. Six online platforms now reach more than 10% of the population weekly with news content, compared with just 2% a decade ago.

These are not merely platform preferences. They represent a fundamentally different conception of what news is for. Young audiences, the report finds, want news that feels relevant to their lives, delivered with intimacy and authenticity, preferably by a personality they have chosen to trust. 

They are not looking for institutional authority. They are looking for someone who seems to understand them. The old broadcast model, exemplified by a trusted anchor speaking to a mass audience from behind a desk, has given way to a creator economy in which individual voices, whether credentialed or not, compete for attention in the same algorithmic space.

And now a third actor has entered the room. Since ChatGPT launched in late 2022, generative artificial intelligence has become a meaningful news source, particularly for the young: 15% of 18-to-24-year-olds say they used AI to access news in the past week, compared with just 3% of those 55 and older. 

This is not a rounding error. It is a preview of where news consumption is headed. For a growing share of young adults, the first question they ask about the world is not typed into a search bar or scrolled past on a social feed. Instead, AI synthesizes, summarizes and responds in seconds without a byline, a corrections policy or an institutional reputation at stake.

The democratic implications deserve scrutiny. Research consistently shows that news consumption increases political participation, strengthens civic knowledge, and builds resilience against misinformation. But these benefits depend on news that is accurate, contextualized and accountable. The shift toward personality-led creators and AI-generated summaries puts all three at risk. Creators are not bound by editorial standards. AI systems are not bound by anything except the data they were trained on and the guardrails their developers choose to impose.

I led The Museum of Television and Radio, now The Paley Center for Media, watching the archive of American broadcasting document exactly this kind of generational rupture in slow motion. Each new medium promised democratization and delivered fragmentation. Radio gave way to television; television gave way to cable; cable gave way to the internet. Each transition produced winners and casualties among both journalists and the public they served.

The Reuters Institute report is not a eulogy. It is a diagnosis. Young audiences are not disengaged. They are engaged differently on terms that legacy media did not set and cannot easily change. The question for journalism is not how to lure young people back to the old habits. It is whether the new habits can sustain the informed citizenry that democracy requires.

The answer is not yet clear. The urgency could not be more obvious.

Stuart N. Brotman is Digital Media Laureate at The Media Institute and the author of “Free Expression Under Fire: Defending Free Speech and Free Press Across the Political Spectrum.” He can be reached at snbrotman@gmail.com