Berthelsen, Rebecca, and Michael Hameleers. “Meet Today’s Young News Users: An Exploration of How Young News Users Assess Which News Providers Are Worth Their While in Today’s High-Choice News Landscape.” Digital Journalism, 2020, vol. 9, no. 5, 619-635.
Authors Rebecca Berthelsen and Michael Hameleers examine a qualitative study from Denmark that sought to determine how Generation Z consumes news. The authors’ examination highlights elements of news organizations’ decision-making that citizens of any democracy should consider.
The authors start by providing context, summarizing changes to news production and consumption during the past 15 years and explaining the theoretical framework they used to analyze the study’s results. They focus on news organizations’ increasing dependence on data analytics “to get a better understanding of what their audiences want” and then tailor their coverage and services “to the preferences of news users” (620). The authors’ concern is that organizations’ analytics are limited to pattern recognition. Of greater concern to me was organizations’ overt acknowledgement that they are “tailoring” the news instead of simply reporting what happened. Unlike social media, news coverage should be reality-based and as objective as possible, not shaped by what an organization determines its audience wants to see and hear.
The study sought to determine what made news worthwhile to subjects (621) “[w]hich needs or desired gratifications made the media user, for instance, read newspapers rather than watching television” (620). The digital age’s “convergence” of coverage and platforms has made that more difficult to figure out using quantitative data alone, so the study’s authors interviewed 20 members of Gen Z and analyzed their responses for seven “functionalities” of “worthwhileness”:
Overview of recent news: having a general sense of what’s happening to avoid appearing uninformed (627)
Anything new: having headline-level knowledge of breaking news to fill time while bored or to be the first among peers to know what’s happening (628)
Relevant news: having information useful to their everyday lives (628)
Big news: having a sense of what’s happening with a particular event of interest to a large number of people so they appear informed (628)
In-depth news: learning more about a topic based on personal interest (629)
Niche news: seeking information about a topic based on personal interest (629)
Commented news: seeking to be entertained or educated about current events by social media (629)
More important than the “functionalities” were five dimensions that determined when, where, why, and how study subjects consumed news: time, effort, mental energy, visual focus, and money (630-631). When all of these factors were combined, Gen Z’s news consumption came down to convenience.
The sample size was 20 Danes, so generalization to Gen Z in the U.S. is very limited, but the article offers opportunities to create lessons plans asking students to consider when, where, why, and how they consume news as well as how their habits might subject them to bias, slant, or “fake news.”