How to bring news to youngsters in the age of smartphones and social media ?
YLE is the leader and most trusted news outlet in Finland (1). It has reached the milestone of one million registered users in October 2018, which accounts for a fifth of Finland’s population. However, almost none of the YLE subscribers lie in the 18–29 age bracket. What keeps the 15–29 years old audience out of YLE’s reach ?
The answer is that the generation of the people born in the 90s and later are subject to one of the greatest disruption the news industry has ever known, aside the emergence of TV news in 1959 and the rise of the Internet in the 90s : The takeover of Smartphones and Social Media (2). In the U.S., 89% of the people access news through their mobile devices and 68% use social media as first media source. This shift requires news to come to the audience in a different way than before.
Back to the 1960s, News had no competitors for attracting people’s attention, there was only one TV channel that could be watched. Now, people have many different apps and sources of information that come to them through notifications and it is genuinely hard to hold someone’s attention for more than a couple of minutes. One of the big challenges for news outlets is to develop appropriate formats to convey information to the audience through mobile.
BBC released in July 2018 a study about the prototyping and experiment of several new story mobile formats for news (4). The formats were designed in close cooperation with a sample from the 18–24 age group audience, in order to draw a clear idea of the current weaknesses of the classic news formats BBC has to overcome. They finally developed 4 main formats that turned out to fit pretty well the audience’s needs : The first one is a standard article with embedded content that you can expand by touching it. When articulating their needs, many youngsters revealed that the level of the BBC articles were too high for them and they often had to perform parallel searches on the internet to manage to understand the article. Addressing this issue, BBC spotted all the complex words and notions in their article and embedded in each a short explanation. The second format allows the user to choose intuitively its own format between a long text, a short text and a video and revealed to be much appreciated by the audience. The third format addresses the need for the audience to embrace news that help them build their own opinions. On top of that, as stated in the study, the youths engaged in the study revealed they were aware of the filter bubble effect their social media environment had on their open-mindedness and ability to judge. Hence, they expressed the need to see different opinions, even those that are not from their political side. De facto, BBC developed a format for controversial news topics (e.g. Catalonia’s Independence in Spain) where the user can briefly see a statement of the facts and afterwards can access the opinion sections : For each opinion on the issue, there is a section where the arguments supporting the opinions are listed. At the end of the opinion section, there is a poll summarizing the popularity of the opinions, which the user can participate to. The fourth format is a video format where the text is subtitled below the video. Nothing really disruptive, right ? But here is the innovation : The subtitles, synchronized with the video, are presented as a feed so that the user can scroll the subtitles and move forward in the video at the same time. Users reported the format was pretty intuitive and that it allowed them to easily skim a video content.
What this study from BBC shows us is that a complete redesign of the classic news format is necessary to help the news outlets address a new generation that is more and more used to deal with short and interactive content on their phone.
Beyond the matter of the format, classic news outlets understood that it is idle to reach youths only through news apps. US residents spend in average 2 hours and 4 minutes per day on social media (3). When it comes to millennials, the time spent is increased by 30 minutes. Therefore, almost all the big news companies have now started to relocate their broadcast in social media feeds. And obviously, social media allowed them to perform something that was nearly impossible before : Smart multicast thanks to the targeting algorithm. Social media allow news outlet to offer us more and more personalized content. We can state that each of us has his own news feed on Facebook. This simple statement proves that news have somehow already managed to offer fully personalized content. But they have to do even more to catch our attention on these messy feeds. On Facebook, they have to compete with all the entertainment that fills our feed, such as cute cat videos or buzz content (e.g. BuzzFeed). Beyond the personalization of the feed, the news companies have to design new attractive formats. More and more content is released in the video format. There is even a new hybrid format emerging : Mute videos with text, to allow people to watch the content in public places without headphones. One other news format we can also mention is the story format : Some media manage to reach audience through snapchat with a snapchat story-like format, i.e. interactive photo/video content with text, where you have to swipe or just touch the screen to play the sequence.
It has never been as difficult as now to catch and retain someone’s attention on his phone. Advertisers, entertainers and news broadcasters are competing against each others on social media feeds. The classic media houses have to reinvent from scratch their strategy in order to address the new generation audience. The challenge is huge and is not just the news outlets’ concern, but a societal concern. If news broadcasting doesn’t evolve and manage to cope with the new technologies, the next generation will develop in a world where all the information flow is cornered by intellectually poor and deadening entertainment content.
(3) https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-social-media-use-by-generation/
(4) https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2018-07-prototyping-news-story-article-format-journalism
