Guest Essay

Jeremy Gilbert: Embrace new audiences, new platforms, and new creators

Next-gen news consumers haven’t completely forsaken us for Sora-generated videos of dogs skiing, but their understanding of journalism doesn’t hew too closely to a dusty textbook definition either.

By Jeremy Gilbert

February 4, 2026

This essay is part of a series on the 2026 Lenfest Institute-Aspen Digital Local News Summit, an annual convening of the country’s leading journalists, publishers, funders, news creators, and other industry professionals. 

I regularly hear from people who care about news and democracy, and who think that journalism and journalists are disappearing. These people seem to believe that so few young people watch, listen, or read the news that if journalism were to die, next-gen audiences might not even notice. 

But it’s just not true.

For our Next Gen News 2 study, Northwestern University’s Knight Lab at Medill undertook quantitative and qualitative consumer research across Brazil, India, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We conducted two weeks of daily media diary studies with more than 80 young news consumers, and we interviewed more than 19 accomplished emerging news producers around the world — you might think of them as news creators or news influencers. 

Our results flatly contradict the idea that young people avoid or ignore the news. 

Fifty-three percent of respondents aged 18-24 reported consuming the news at least once per day, and 31% said they consume news multiple times per day. And 65% of next-gen news consumers “value news for [their] personal and professional development.”

These young news consumers are not disengaged; they are discerning. 

Nor are these young news consumers struggling to find information; they are exhausted by the volume they encounter. As Hedavam, a young U.S. news consumer, told us: “One of the biggest challenges for me when trying to stay informed is the fact that there’s just so much content out there. I sometimes don’t even know where to start.”

Across our research, we saw that many news consumers felt similarly. News consumers are more likely to believe they are drowning than starving. 

Dev in India said something very similar: “There is so much news out there from so many sources, and it can get overwhelming. It’s also hard sometimes to figure out which sources to trust.”  

But next-gen news consumers do not feel powerless in the face of this informational landslide. They report considering their content decisions (eg, “Do I like this video?” or “Should not watch that one?”) while always thinking about: How might this action or decision impact ‘their algorithm?’ 

These news consumers consciously shape their information environment and regularly turn on or off notifications to suit their needs. They think broadly about their entire information diet, not segregating out ‘news’ as a task or a chore to be dreaded and avoided. 

‘News,’ at least as these next-gen consumers see it, is evolving. We categorized their news definitions into four categories: ‘civic information,’ ‘personally impactful,’ ‘something everyone is talking about,’ or ‘entertaining non-fiction.’ 

Next-gen news consumers want news, just not always the Norman Rockwell version. This audience hasn’t completely forsaken us for Sora-generated videos of golden doodles skiing, but their understanding of journalism doesn’t hew too closely to a dusty textbook definition either. 

Paula in the United Kingdom said: “Information is much more accessible than 30 years ago, but with that comes a set of ‘problems’/difficulties such as fake news and the manipulation of news for bad intentions. … education hasn’t fully adapted to the new technologies, making a generation that sometimes struggles to identify what news [is] real and [what is] not.”

As a young reporter, I leaned heavily on the legitimacy of my newsroom’s name on my press pass. No one should have trusted me. I had not personally earned the public’s trust, but luckily for me, my newsroom had. 

Today, it is almost the opposite. Like most major institutions, traditional newsrooms don’t automatically symbolize reliability and truth. Next-gen audiences know that individuals are more likely to witness events than professional reporters, and citizens are just as capable of documenting them. 

Audience members, especially younger ones, trust each other to help make sense of events, and professional journalists are part of their verification process, but are not automatic arbiters of truth. 

Barney, a young Nigerian news consumer, put it bluntly: “I understand that it’s common practice for reporters and all to feel impartial and sound almost robotic when delivering news and headlines, but I think that’s very archaic… I think we should show compassion through everything we do.”

News consumers have come to realize that journalists often ‘witness’ news events the same way news consumers do via social media. If journalists find out what’s going on from Instagram, TikTok, or X, what separates them from emerging news producers or other news consumers? For emerging news producers, establishing trust and building affinity by centering on their personality and humanity is their differentiator and a conscious strategy. 

All the media literacy training in the world cannot force someone to trust.

But that doesn’t mean that legacy news is without value to next-gen consumers. Many of them describe scanning legacy news sites and apps. Using headlines and hierarchy to infer importance and verify facts. According to Daniel, a U.K. participant, the “[BBC] is sort of responsible for providing news on everything.” And that sense that the BBC sees and knows all does bring value to its news judgment — even if next-gen audiences aren’t always reading, watching, or listening to the stories they see from legacy media. 

Eugene Meyer, the father of Katherine Graham and one of The Washington Post’s most influential owners, oversaw The Post when newspapers were the platforms of their day. Back then, editors chose whose ideas and views got aired, selected which facts were shared, and decided how to frame those facts. Meyer laid out a set of principles for his news organization. They included the need to: “ascertain and tell the truth” and “be fair, free, and wholesome.”

How many people in news audiences today would believe that journalism lives up to those ideals, or CAN realistically aspire to them?

Successful emerging news producers actively show their reporting inputs when presenting stories so that news consumers can verify them. UnderTheDeskNews often presents sources behind the presenter, TLDR News provides a full list of original material sources for each of its videos and the Daily Aus founder Sam Koslowski told us that he “believe[s] in giving people the facts and information and explaining what it all means in as simple a way as possible, so that people can make their own decisions from there… We want to help everyone start from the same spot [of shared truths].”

These approaches are not unfamiliar in legacy newsrooms, but young news consumers don’t always attribute these values to established news. Unfortunately, established newsrooms cannot simply remake themselves in the model of emerging news producers. It’s not easy being an emerging news producer either. According to “The Rise of the Creator-Journalist,” produced by the Video Consortium, Fordham University, and Project C, the most common way emerging news producers fund their work is with their personal savings. It’s hard to agree on a single definition of what constitutes financial sustainability in journalism, but I’m confident it’s not that.

Perhaps emerging news creators and legacy media need to find mutual benefit through collaboration. We need to remember the importance of business services, things like shared sales and marketing efforts. It’s easy to forget the difficulty in setting up accounting, human resources, retirement plans, and more. Legacy newsrooms have capacities they may not value, while emerging news producers may want and need them. And newsrooms would benefit from emerging news producers who command audiences, convey trust, and exist natively in the places where audiences willingly congregate. 

Most legacy news producers know they need to reach people where they are. Emerging news producers are already there. 

We need to invent new types of relationships between creators and newsrooms. We need to value journalists who have or can build relationships with audiences. We need to support journalists who have the skills to report, analyze and connect with news consumers. 

We cannot command these new journalists as Ben Bradlee once deployed cub reporters; we need instead to empower and reward them. Newsrooms may need to be more like creative agencies, sublimating their brand and centering the voices closest to their audiences. 

In his 1958 book, ‘In the Poetics of Space,’ Gaston Bachelard discusses paths of desire, the footpaths “created by usage” that pedestrians carve out of grass and dirt instead of using those deliberately designed for them. Those paths reflect human intent and can be no more practically ignored or thwarted than the desire of news consumers to seek out information where they want it, in the form they need it, and in the places they already frequent.

Our job, all of us journalists in legacy newsrooms, startups, individuals and organizations, educators, employees, owners, and funders, is to ensure that our community and our society have the coverage that we need and we deserve. These are the critical questions we must ask ourselves:

• What do we do with great reporters who cannot easily command their own audiences? 
• How do we ensure that emerging news producers who build the trust and affinity we need and admire don’t starve or abandon their values to eat?
• When should we protect legacy institutions versus invest in new ones?

Journalist Kevin Merida recently asked: “Where will the next news scoops come from?”  But I want to add to that and also ask: How can we support the people behind the scoops? And how can we ensure that someone sees and believes them?