Beyond the algorithm: 10 Strategies for attracting young news audiences
By Alexandra Borchardt and Jana Koch
There are many assumptions but surprisingly little evidence of how to engage young audiences with news. Commonly voiced concerns are that young people just consume short-form video, trust creators more than news brands and won’t pay for news anyway because they are just not that interested, particularly not in politics.
But reality is more nuanced: In some settings young people do trust media brands more than personalities, they follow the news avidly, and they demonstrate considerable attention spans if invested in something, even for text-based products.
We tested these and more assumptions in a qualitative research project, commissioned by Austrian Wiener Zeitung Media Group.
We based our study on structured interviews with young people and media leaders in Austria and with more than a dozen international experts, amounting to a total of 58 in-depth interviews.
We then contrasted our findings with the latest research by leading organisations like the Reuters Institute’s “Understanding young news audiences” and the NextGen News project, a Knight Lab/FT Strategies cooperation.
The full report, Knapp daneben ist auch vorbei is available in German and English (Close, but no cigar, is also close) here.
So, what is it exactly that media leaders need to know when serving young audiences? There is no one-size-fits-all solution, of course. But we have identified 10 evidence-based strategies to guide media leaders.
1. Understand and Serve Audiences
There is no such thing as “the” young user. Expectations and habits differ not only between generational cohorts, but also within them. The old mass media formula “one size fits all” no longer works. You need to decide which community to serve on which platform, and to understand which codes to use to reach them.
This can best be achieved by letting young colleagues in your organisation take the lead.
Our interviews suggest: young users are indeed interested in politics, the economy, and international affairs, provided the perspective and narrative style suit them.
Different platforms serve different purposes: Long podcasts, video documentaries, and games serve a different purpose than short videos, push notifications, and WhatsApp messages.
What doesn’t work, for sure: Cramming everything into TikToks, or presenting every message as comedy.
2. Add Value to People’s Lives
The digital world delivers content in abundance. Information overload and news avoidance are prevalent. Young people want to use their time wisely.
They expect journalism to provide not just updates, but also explanations, solutions, and perspectives.
They derive additional value from a particular voice or new forms of news experiences, local or niche context, narrative styles, or perspectives that surprise, dive deeper, or are closer to the reality of their lives.
Marco Kruse, Managing Director of Ingame, Ippen Media’s youth initiative: “As a young person, you don’t just want to hear all day about the problems of the present; you want to know what your future looks like and what the solution is.”
Doing less but doing it better is a valuable strategy. This holds particularly true for the AI era which is likely to put an end to copy-and-paste journalism.
3. Be Confident
Journalism has something to offer, and young people get that. So, don’t sell yourself short, but deliver exactly what your core business is: independent, fact-based, strong journalism. Anyone determined to make any content funny or imitate slang is set up for failure. “Don’t try to be cool, because that is not your role”, says Pierre Caulliez, who leads Wan-Ifra’s News Creator Exchange programme.
Users come to media brands precisely for what they can’t find elsewhere. And media companies can confidently promote that. The most successful German news brand on social media, public service ARD’s Tagesschau, shows how this can be done.
Timo Spiess, Tagesschau’s Head of Social Media, says: “We try to find a conversational tone (…) that conveys: ‘we take you seriously, we take this platform seriously, but we also take ourselves and our brand seriously.’”
4. Build Personal Brands
International research suggests that young people trust individuals more than brands. However, this perspective is shaped by experiences in countries like the US, where there are no public service media that have a mandate to serve all of society, or in settings where state interests have captured mainstream media.
Creators sense gaps where they find them and happily step in. In contrast, our research shows that young adults in Austria and Germany continue to trust major media brands.
However, individual creators gain traction when they have demonstrated clearly recognisable expertise in niche areas.
That said, authenticity is a core value for young people. Amid the surging flood of automatically generated content, they’ve developed a particularly keen sense for whether something or someone is “real.”
This opens opportunities for media: they can strategically build personal brands. The key though, is not to stake everything on a single individual, but to develop clearly distinct voices.
This also helps decrease the risk of losing popular content creators and their following. As Spiess describes: “The brand is the star. The brand is carried by faces. But these faces always step back a little behind the brand.”
5. Make Diversity Visible
Many young people are allergic to what newsrooms have long characterised as quality journalism: the know-it-all attitude, preachiness, complex phrasing, or irony and sarcasm.
This suggests: Don’t talk about young people, but with them – and let them speak for themselves. Especially in ageing societies, the perspectives of young people are often overlooked.
Co-creation can do wonders, but don’t assume that everyone wants to participate. In general, young people want more diversity of perspectives in news media, but this needs to go beyond the buzzword: different social backgrounds, experiences, and life stories need to be reflected.
Funk, the youth network of German public media ARD and ZDF, for example, had determined through data analysis that it struggled to reach audiences with strong roots in rural areas.
This led to “Sag mal,” which, in the words of Funk CEO Philipp Schild, became one of their most successful formats: “It focuses heavily on tradition and rural culture and is aimed at people who have a strong sense of identity in those areas.”
Interestingly, the young Austrians we interviewed voiced rather traditional expectations in news, emphasising objectivity as a journalistic value. This contrasts with assumptions – also by some of our expert interview partners – that young audiences explicitly demand a point of view.
6. Build and Retain Relationships
Media need to be present in the everyday lives of young adults to build connections, ideally relationships. Don’t wait for them to come to you, but go where they already are: on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, in algorithmic feeds – or to their schools, youth clubs, and universities.
Real-life encounters can foster closeness. If you can afford it, organise workshops, guided tours, even festivals. They do not necessarily need to be about media. Relationships are built through presence, relevance, and shared experiences.
Caulliez says that publishers underestimate the potential of events: “When someone attends a specific event, they are 10 times more likely to remember the brand than if they only watch 10 seconds of YouTube Shorts from the same brand. It creates added value to build connections to different types of events throughout a person’s entire life cycle.”
7. Diversify Monetisation
Purely transactional monetisation models like subscriptions appeal to very few young adults, especially as, in many European countries, every household has to pay the public service media license fee.
This does not rule out a willingness to spend money on private news media, but people will only pay for tangible added value such as an experience or a feeling of identity.
Liesbeth Nizet, Head of Future Audiences Monetization at Mediahuis says: “Creating a sense of belonging is super important.” Many publishers fail to reach young people with their product offerings. Some are not even known to them, others come across as inflexible, overloaded, or outdated. Younger audiences are used to personalisation and choice. A student subscription alone is not an innovation.”
Nadine Eibl (formerly Günther), new product and innovation manager at German publisher Funke says: “Media companies simply need to realise that it’s pointless to force the existing offers onto young audiences.”
Our interview partners see products for young users primarily as an investment in the brand and thus the future; some found potential in branded content. Nevertheless, investing in young audiences often pays off in a different way.
Many media companies have learned that formats for younger people often attract broader segments of society than their traditional fare.
8. Think in Formats
Simply investing in vertical short-form video won’t do the job. Social media channels differ, and the data from each platform reflects how the respective algorithms interpret certain signals.
Of course, this type of analysis is thankless, because just when you think you’ve figured out a pattern, third party-platforms might change it. A dataset compiled by the Financial Times in October 2025 for a story titled “Have we passed peak social media?” even revealed that time spent on social media has been declining since 2022.
Many young people are themselves unhappy with their excessive social media consumption, and political initiatives want to curb access for kids and teenagers.
“There is definitely a backlash against noise” says Nic Newman, Senior Research Associate at the Reuters Institute in Oxford. While the extent of news consumption via social media platforms will remain significant for a few more years, media companies should develop formats that could also thrive on their own platforms.
George Montagu, who oversaw the NextGen News project for FT Strategies, recommends redirecting energies from content to formats: “Right now, they (journalists) spend 80 to 90 percent of their time thinking, researching, and writing, and 10 percent figuring out ‘How do I package this for social media?’
“But what if they invested 50 percent in research and writing and 50 percent in turning that into something cool and innovative? No one is asking for more content. They’re asking to receive content in different formats and styles.”
9. Optimise for AI and Convenience
In the digital world, consumer expectations are shaped by Netflix, Spotify, and the like. This applies to both content and user-friendliness, the so-called user experience (UX).
Journalistic products must be easily accessible and navigable. Younger consumers also expect that important news will somehow find them. With developments in AI, media consumption habits are likely to change. Much content might soon no longer be consumed directly by humans but read by machines first.
However, many of our interviewees see opportunities for media companies in the world of synthetic content and overload.
For example, verifying factual accuracy is becoming more important. And some professionals see an advantage precisely for brands that focus on people.
Smilla Schwörer, business development manager at Funke and herself a Gen Z, says: “People overestimate how open young people are to AI. Young people want real people, real opinions, real faces, and real stories. I’d say the Boomer generation is much more likely to listen to an AI podcast than we are. We’re probably also a bit quicker at recognising AI and are therefore a bit more critical of the whole thing.”
10. Innovate Fast
The media industry is losing young audiences less due to a lack of ideas than a lack of courage. Innovation requires a different mindset: less fear of failure, less clinging to routines, and more trust in experimentation. Innovation-friendly leadership means allowing for setbacks and delegating responsibility but also shifting resources from declining to growing parts of the company. Young media professionals who understand the codes, languages, and dynamics of digital communities, should be encouraged to step up instead of being cornered into some social media team with no career prospects.
Sophia Smith Galer, independent news creator and member of Mediahuis’ Future Insight Board, recommends media leaders to make explicit that all staff is responsible for a company’s financial health: “Everyone should be required to do something to innovate every year”.
Conclusion
Reaching young people is a challenging task that requires a strategy: it involves lots of data analysis, experimentation, and a shift in thinking. Many assumptions need to be discarded, along with the structures that go with them.
But Gen Z displays less news fatigue than is often claimed. Spiess from Tagesschau: “The younger generation also wants to dive deeper into things. … (Reaching young people) is a challenge. But it can be done.”
The reward for these efforts isn’t just about securing the future of a newsroom or a company. As Funk’s CEO Schild says: “Anyone who does something for young people is doing something for democracy.”
About The Authors:
Alexandra Borchardt is an independent media researcher, consultant, board director at Republik AG and a member of Wan-Ifra’s Expert Panel; mail@alexandraborchardt.com.
Jana Koch is a researcher and programme manager at Mediengruppe Wiener Zeitung and a PhD candidate in philosophy at Universität Graz; Jana.koch@wienerzeitung.at
