We talk a lot about how to reach young audiences. But there’s a question that comes before that one and it’s more uncomfortable: How do young people even learn to navigate news in the first place? It’s no longer a given. 

I grew up with a newspaper on the kitchen table. A radio that ran every morning in the background. And yes, as a teenager, the late-evening news was more or less a household ritual. (Though I’ll admit, some nights a new episode of “The O.C.” won.)

Now I look at my nephew, who’s 13, and I realise that everything I learned about media, almost by osmosis, is completely foreign to him. When he watches TV at my parents’ place, he means YouTube. And the question of who makes the news? For me, that was always obvious: the people in the newspaper, on the radio, on the news platforms.

But how do you even begin to tell that on social media?

The numbers we should know

Eighty-four percent of U.S. teenagers describe news media using negative words. The top five, from a survey conducted by the News Literacy Project between April and May 2025 with 756 teens aged 13 to 18: Fake. Crazy. Boring. Biased. Sad.

And here is what makes it worse: About half of those teens believe journalists frequently make up details and pay for sources. Not Fox News. Not tabloids. Journalists — as a category.

Vanessa Bitter is the incoming CEO of #UseTheNews, the German news literacy initiative backed by the DPA, taking over on July 1. She presented at our World Congress in Berlin, and her argument was deceptively simple: “You cannot expect young people to trust journalism if they’ve never had the chance to understand it.”

I asked her what she wants to achieve in her new role. Her answer was unambiguous: news and information literacy embedded in every German school by 2030, as self-evident as reading or arithmetic.

The argument behind it is structural, not idealistic: 

“A functioning democracy requires people who can contextualise information and question sources,” she says. “Years of research and practice have shown us clearly: We reach young people above all when we work with them, not when we treat them simply as a target group.”

4 things that actually work

Bitter’s approach rests on four principles she has refined over five years:

1. Connect to their world, not just their platforms. Being on TikTok is not enough. You need to understand what actually matters to a 16-year-old, which means asking them, not assuming. Street interview formats work precisely because they do both at once: You get the content and you make the person feel seen.

2. Create transparency. Bitter is convinced the journalistic process needs to be demystified and that livestreams are one of the best tools for this — not despite their messiness but because of it. A live stream that goes slightly off-script feels more honest than a polished package. That spontaneity is the point. Offline, pop-up newsrooms and news camps, festival-like events where students meet journalists, create the same effect: Journalism stops being a black box.

3. Drive participation. The most effective trust building happens when young people move from passive consumers to active participants. #UseTheNews runs projects where school classes produce their own podcasts or TikTok content together with local media partners, and the content often gets published. That sense of self-efficacy, Bitter argued in Berlin, is irreplaceable.

4. Bring it into schools. Trust cannot be expected where it has not been taught. The CCYA, their Competence Centre for Young Audiences, is a hub where journalists, educators, and young people test new formats together before rolling them out more broadly. This can be board games for teachers, idea-thons, or cross-border news camps.

Failure of legibility

For a growing number of young news consumers, the distinction between journalist and content creator is genuinely blurry. Among adults under 30, trust in social platforms nearly matches trust in national news outlets. News and content are becoming interchangeable, and most newsrooms have not fully reckoned with what that means.

Bitter frames this not as a failure of young people’s judgment but as a failure of legibility. Journalism hasn’t made itself readable to this generation. That’s the problem we all should be looking at.

So I asked her directly: Where does a news organisation even begin? The first step, she said, is encounter. 

“Media organisations that seek genuine dialogue understand young people in a way no target group analysis can replace,” she said. 

In her projects, young people and editorial teams learn equally from each other. Whoever tries journalism themselves changes their relationship to media. And whoever listens and enables participation produces differently.

The stakes behind that argument are high. On TikTok and Instagram, young people constantly encounter content that looks like news but doesn’t hold up to journalistic scrutiny, and that creates a deceptive sense of being informed. 

“Someone who can’t recognise disinformation makes decisions on a false basis. News literacy is therefore not a supplementary school qualification. It is a prerequisite for democratic participation.”

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