Saving Democracy Through Modeling Healthy News Habits

Leah Dajches: If I ask you to think about a time your parents or caregivers taught you an important life skill, what comes to mind? Do you have a flashback of tentatively tapping the gas pedal while they sat in the passenger seat as you learned how to drive? Or perhaps, what pops up is a memory of standing side by side in the kitchen learning how to prepare a meal. As you consider the things you learn from the adults in your life, does reading, watching, or listening to the news come to mind? Research shows that what's known as the parent-learning model, basically kids mimicking their parents’ habits, is one of the greatest predictors of what kinds of habits a young adult will develop when it comes to staying informed of current events. And this is important since a functioning democracy relies on an informed citizenry. But the current cohort of young Americans, not only spends fewer total minutes consuming any news than any other age group, they also spend substantially less time with the news than young adults did 20 years ago.

Matt Jordan: News organizations are trying to change that by investing in interactive and mobile technologies to try to engage younger audiences. Yet as Leah said, a big predictor of if and how a young person engages with news is the behavior they observe in the adults around them. To learn more about news, socialization, and its implications for Gen Z's news engagement, we're going to talk with Stephanie Edgerly, a professor and associate dean of research at the Medill School of Journalism.

Her research explores how features of new media alter the way audiences consume news and impact their engagement. Stephanie's recent projects have explored why people don't consume news, as well as the varied ways people define news. We're going to talk with her about how her research can be understood and applied to ensure that generations to come are engaged with the news and, by extension, our democracy. Stephanie, welcome to News Over Noise.

Stephanie Edgerly: Thank you for having me.

Leah Dajches: So, you recently worked on the 2023 Medill News Socialization Study. And there were some really interesting findings related to teens and news engagement. Can you tell us a little bit about what you found?

Stephanie Edgerly: Yeah, I mean, we were really interested in delving a little deeper in how teens are consuming news. And so, to do that, we had to ask a lot of different questions, not just about social media in general but specific platforms of social media and a lot of different sources for people—beyond newspapers or television news for getting news about what's happening in the world or in their community. So, the first step, I think, was asking a lot of questions to understand, what are teens using to get news? And then the second component of that was really trying to explore what spaces teens inhabit where they bump into news, or they encounter news. And so, one of the big spaces that we looked at in this study was schools.

Leah Dajches: And in the study, 29% of teens said they encounter news daily. This seems like a relatively low percentage, but you were quoted in a recent article that this is overall encouraging. Why is this a surprising finding?

Stephanie Edgerly: I mean, the baseline for this is so interesting. What do we expect people daily? I guess, we want 100% saying, yes, I consume news all the time. But even among adults, we don't see that that's true. So, I think that there's a prevailing very negative narrative that young people are disinterested in news, and fleeing news, and avoiding news. And while I think that's true for a segment and happy to talk more about that, I was really encouraged that when we have a wider lens of what we consider news consumption or where people are getting news that we do see that there are sources that teens are using for these kind of daily encounters. Now, that's not everybody, but maybe that was me just enjoying or wanting to be a little more optimistic than I think the usual narratives about teens and news lead us to be.

Matt Jordan: And when we talk about news, what do we mean? Is it just anything that's new to them? Or how are you defining news?

Stephanie Edgerly: Yeah, I mean, it's a really fundamental but super tricky question to answer. And in a couple of studies, I've done with a co-author of mine, Emily Vraga, who's a professor at the University of Minnesota. We developed this concept called "newsness", which actually is this idea that news is really hard to define, but you know it when you see it. And so, through several experiments and also a little bit of qualitative research that I've done, we really try to capture, well, what is that gut instinct that makes people think something is news? And as you mentioned, a lot of times, it is the breaking news element that really gets people, like, this is something important that just happened tends to garner higher ratings of newsness. Also, more traditional things like fact checking or an investigative method, people associate with news. Opinions, they don't associate with news. I mean, I'm making that sound rather traditional. There's also the fun finding that people are more likely to think something is news when it agrees with their political viewpoint or comes from a source that is congruent with their political viewpoint. So, we're not completely unbiased animals here. But it is really, really tricky. And so, for this study, we did try, at the very beginning, to provide teens a general definition of news. If you haven't caught on, take a really big umbrella, a big tent view of what counts as news. But we did say that this is where you would get information about current events or political current events. And this could be from a newspaper. It could be from a website, or it could be from a social media page.

Leah Dajches: OK, so just to continue to think about how you're defining news—in this study, were you able to parse apart if teens were consuming celebrity news or if they were actually consuming current event news? I know from teaching undergraduate classes, a lot of them, when they say news, they often mean they're reading about celebrities. Were you able to make this distinction in the study?

Stephanie Edgerly: Well, the way I have gone about it is, one, asking a general—how often are you consuming news? And this is how we would like you to be thinking about it. But then the other way I get around it or try to get around it is asking more specific source questions, where we have a better idea of the type of content that is being delivered. It's not foolproof. So, in the survey, we did ask questions about entertainment news programs. And that was separate. We asked questions about sports commentary programs. That was separate. We have some questions about late night talk shows and watching SNL. That's separate. All of these things, I think, are important because not all the time do they offer this, but they can be a vehicle for learning about the political election, for learning about an international war, for example, when celebrities are speaking out about it. Learning about race relations, when athletes speak out about it or equal pay. So, I wanted to include those, but I think there are some differences that we still want to try to capture at the same time. So, my way around that is, unfortunately for a lot of my coauthors on projects, is asking a lot of questions about media consumption or news consumption. So, in the study that we just did of teens, I think it was like 22 questions that we asked about specific sources or platforms that they would encounter news on.

Leah Dajches: Well, and thinking about sources more, in the study, you'd found that roughly a quarter of all surveyed teens said they engaged with news on YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram on a daily or weekly basis. And we actually, we interviewed social media strategist Annie Wu last season. And she believed that social media is enticing for young people because it's authentic. Is this a similar sentiment to what you and your team theorize about why teens tend to seek news or engage with news on social media?

Stephanie Edgerly: Yeah, I mean, I think, in some ways, it's a convenient location. As we think about spaces that we spend a lot of time at, I think social media platforms are one of the big ones. And especially when we think about forces like cord cutting and the fact that many teens live in households where there might not actually be a television or one that no longer has antenna-like broadcast channel capabilities. And so, we are increasingly pushing people towards platforms like YouTube, which is a little different, I would say, than the other types of social media, but one that, in my opinion, we don't know a lot about because it always comes up as a really popular space that people are getting news on. And in some ways, it resembles television. You have channels that you can subscribe to. And you get alerts. And you can watch things live. You can watch a channel live. But in other ways, it's radically different. You've got comments below. You can move around. You get recommended videos. Next, there's a collision of a whole bunch of different types of sources. It's not just a certain caliber or quality of video that is there. So I think we are just scratching the surface as to what it means to consume news on YouTube. And as this study shows, I think it's going to be really, really important for understanding the news experience for teens but also for young adults.

Matt Jordan: So, we do know that—and I think what you're saying is this is that they prefer to get it through their phones because it's convenient. They're with them all the time. Pew had something similar to say. They said about 83% of 18 to 29-year-olds prefer to get it through digital devices. So, do we know how they curate their news over digital devices? Are they intentional or are they just relying on whatever the algorithm feeds them?

Stephanie Edgerly: Yeah, so again, curation, algorithmic. Curation is another really important but tricky concept to parse out. And it depends on the platform. And we also don't know that much about it because these companies are not super transparent about how they configure these algorithms. And they've handicapped a lot of outside research being done on these sites to try to figure out how the algorithms function. But I will say that—so anytime we're talking about algorithms, you tap into what type of content a teen or a user in general attracts. And some of that is based on our behavior, what we've watched before, what we have clicked on, what we spent time on. And then some of it is based on the data that these platforms know about us and what they think we will engage in. And it's that second step that a big divide happens. And we have some research that shows this. And I'm really taking from scholar Kjerstin Thorson, who is a professor at Michigan State University, who has done a lot on this idea of attraction and who attracts news on these platforms. And she argues that there is a big divide because these companies know that certain people are more likely to want news, and engage with news, and like politics, and get fired up with a political video or a political post. And so, they're more likely to suggest that to them or have their algorithm be tweaked in a way that they see that. Other people, they can go the whole upcoming political election without seeing a single political post. Maybe the most scandalous one will find their way to their YouTube page or their Facebook page. But really, the algorithm knows that that's not what they're interested in. That's not what their social network is posting about. They might not even be a registered voter, if we're talking about adults. And so there really is no incentive for suggesting or feeding them news.

I'll circle back here. Anytime we're talking about algorithms, we have to be aware of this deep divide in how these platforms are categorizing certain people. And that's where we start tapping into inequalities, like structural inequalities that exist in society. And what we show in this paper is that these are already starting when we start thinking about the opportunities to consume news at home, amongst your friends, and in schools. Already, there is a big divide between teens that have a student-led news outlet at their school. 40% of US teens have that. We're seeing a big divide among rural versus urban teens. And so, as you see these divides start early, they're only going to be exacerbated when we take these things to platforms. And when we start asking, well, what are you seeing on your Facebook page? Or what are you seeing on your YouTube page? Yes, some of it is absolutely driven by you and what you're clicking on, but a lot of it is also tapping into these inequalities and what you are likely to do based on who you are, where you're from, and how likely you are to be somebody that's interested in politics or news.

Leah Dajches: That's really interesting. We've talked on the podcast before about the idea of the news finds me mentality or perception. This idea that news is to come to you on social media. And so, we've grappled with the role of algorithms in news consumption. And something I'm wondering and hopefully you can speak to is, I mean, is it a bad thing that teens are consuming or finding news through mobile technologies, through social media?

Stephanie Edgerly: I mean, my initial reaction is, no. But I think that we need to be realistic about it because it's uneven. Not everybody is getting news. And the types of news they get varies. And I think, I'll reference a study I did several years ago now. But it was asking people where they would go to find breaking information or current events information. And I didn't—I purposely was really careful about the words I said. I didn't say, where would you go to get news? But I was framing it as, where would you go to if something important was happening in your community? Where would you go if you wanted to hear the latest information about a presidential election? Where would you go—trying to poke at things where news would maybe be the answer, but I didn't want to assume that. And among young adults, there were two very similar strategies that came out, but they were also wildly different. And one was social media. But these were people that did the work to mow the lawns, and dust off the sidewalks, and make sure that these were spaces that they could depend upon for news, And I mean, I don't want to create that as 100% positive. You could certainly—there's some selective exposure elements here of, well, I'm only going to follow people that agree with me. But these are young adults or teens that are making conscious decisions about making these spaces for news and what they want to allow in and out.

Other group, and these happen to be young adults who were raised in homes where their parents did not go to college, they also said social media. I mean, this is where young people are hanging out. So that shouldn't surprise us that social media is useful. But when asking—when I ask them if they followed local news, or national news pages, or if their friends posted it, they were like, no, no. I mean, I would assume if something is big enough, it would find me there. Somebody would post about it. And I think that is the danger of social media being a space that, largely, young people are on and can rely on because it's a space that they depend on and spend a lot of time. But we have to remember that there are very different mechanisms at play here between people who are doing the ongoing curation work of making these spaces for news or sometimes making these spaces not for news, but those are active decisions to say, this is what I want from these spaces, versus the people who assume that—and they're not wrong. They assume that when something sensational or something important will find them because somebody will post it. But the big worry there is that it's not always the highest quality content that will find them. What trends is not, as we've learned over and over again, is not always the highest quality reporting.

Matt Jordan: And have you done any work in your surveys or whatnot to get at that issue of quality? What is the quality of news or journalism that young people are going to? I noticed, for example, that one of the larger categories in the bar graphs of your study was that young people are still looking at local news, right? I may be something of a news snob, but in our area, a lot of the local news is owned by Sinclair Broadcasting. And it's not what I would call high quality journalism. So, if you happen to live in this area where they own three out of four of the local TV markets, what you might get is not the best. So how do you deal with this issue of quality?

Stephanie Edgerly: Yeah, it's really tricky. And at least in my work with social media, it's not been very easy to ascertain. We aren't able to pull data and actually see what people are encountering on their newsfeed. I think the closest we can get is something that's more qualitative, where you have people talk through their Facebook feeds, or their Instagram feeds, or even their YouTube feeds. And they can narrate, well, I'm seeing this or I'm seeing that, but it's really tricky. I spend a lot of time—at Medill, we have a big report that was just released about the state of local news. And we have a local news initiative. And so, I spend a lot of time thinking about local news. And as I've been studying young people and teenagers specifically—geez, for at least a decade now. One of the most consistent findings is always in terms of news consumption—the high levels of television local news. And at first, I was like, that's can't be right. Young people don't watch TV. So, it definitely deserves more unpacking. I've done a little bit of qualitative follow up on that. And some of the things I hear is that it's more ritualistic. It's about it being on in the morning. That's what my mom watches. I sit down with her. I get a little bit of it while I'm eating breakfast. Also, there's the element of news you can use, even for teens. Weather, what's happening? Or sports, local sports, that is the one aspect where you're really getting a reporter is at your school or the highlights of the Friday night football game. And so, I do think there is some stickiness that local, particularly local TV—but also it still means a lot—even though I know we don't have a lot of these anymore, but it still really means a lot for teens to be in the print newspaper too. That's still exciting. And then you marry that stickiness with concerns about quality and what we know about ownership and conglomerations. And I mean, I think it's a very valid concern. And I think it's one that a lot of work in the policy area, I think, is what needs to happen here. I think we need to be thinking about how to incentivize local high-quality news. And what the business model looks like for that, I think, is not what it looked like in the past. And so, I'm a little—this might be unrealistic, but I'm a little bit of the mindset that we need more policy interventions to figure out how local news can serve communities and marry it in a high-quality way, because the financial model is just very strange right now for local media.

Leah Dajches: Your response was really resonating with me because I was thinking a lot about my teen years. And shout out to my mom because we used to have the local news on TV in the morning while I was eating breakfast or dinner time. And that's when I would catch glimpses of the news.

And now that I'm an adult, grown up, I don't really watch the local news. I'm on social media. I'm on my mobile technologies. And so, thinking about local news but journalism more broadly, I'm wondering, knowing that teens are our next upcoming generation are really engaging with news on social media, how might this impact the future of journalism?

Stephanie Edgerly: Yeah, I feel a little confident about this because I think we're talking more about this in the media literacy space. But I think it's really important to talk about people's media diet and how you construct a news consumption diet. And it's not just, hey, teens. You should read the Wall Street Journal. You should subscribe to the New York Times. And by the way, I would never recommend that to somebody.

Even an adult, a lot of times, I get asked the question—because I study news avoidance, how can you make a news avoider consume more news? And it's, well, the message is not going to be like, here, I bought you a New York Times. Read it. But I do think we need to be thinking more about how you combine and create a news experience. And some of this was—a lot of this was done for us in the newspaper age and the broadcast age, where you had show stacking, to use a broadcast term. But you had an editor that was thinking about or a producer that was thinking about the combination of stories that make up an experience. And there's a positive story. And then the hard meaty story. And then one for levity. And so, I do a lot of thinking about what it means now that we're out there—by we, I mean us as audiences are out there to piece that together on our own, especially for those people whose news diets are more piecemeal like on social media. Some people still read the print newspaper, still faithfully watch the broadcast news programs for half an hour or an hour. And in that sense, you are getting a holistic package of news. But if you're consuming news on YouTube, or you're consuming news on social media, or you're clicking around from website to website to website—and I know a lot of people that consume a lot of news. And their habits are, well, first I go here. Then I go here. Then I go here. They're really creating this package of news themselves. And so, if that is what a lot of people's habits are, I think we need to be talking more about what are the components that make up that package. And how do you marry in local news, with national news, with news you can use, with something that's more motivational? When we're dealing with an election, which I'll make a wild prediction that it's going to be really intense and people are going to have to constantly be fighting the urge to just tune out, how do you create a package of news experiences that give you the latest information but don't make you want to just check out? And so, I think having that conversation with teens about compiling that experience, and being mindful of that experience, different types of stories, and different types of sources that offer different types of stories, it's a lot more work. And it's not the only way that it has to be. I think it's important to say, hey, you don't want to do that work? Sit down in front of the TV. Somebody's doing it for you. And that might be the appeal to television for a lot of people. But if we are going to be consuming news in this piecemeal way, I do think it's important to give people the roadmap, if you will, so they can compile these experiences that aren't overwhelming and do give them that variation of local, national, different flavors, motivational, not all doom and gloom.

Matt Jordan: Just a reminder, this is News Over Noise. I'm Matt Jordan.

Leah Dajches: And I'm Leah Dajches.

Matt Jordan: We're talking with Stephanie Edgerly, a professor and associate dean of research at Northwestern University about how to get younger Americans to engage with the news. As a parent, I'm a eat your broccoli person. And the danger of that, I suppose, is that my kids will tune out.

But I wonder—one of the things that we experience as teachers and that we experience as—I experience as parents is a short attention span. And in relation to the quality of information, we know that you can't say much in a short amount of time that's going to get it context, that's going to get at the stuff that helps us make meaning of things. So, I'm always worried that as everything gets chopped up and put online—because that's what a lot of news orgs have done. They've taken the local news. And they've given you 15 second bits that can go up or a story that has been chopped up into ways that is easily consumable because that's what—we need to engage students where they are. We need to engage young people where they are. But I worry about this, as the anxious guy, that what we're getting and is what we're—we're just reinforcing through a feedback loop this notion that, don't worry. We're going to make it all convenient for you. We're going to give you these little McNuggets of wisdom that'll be easy and fun to consume. They'll be highly saturated fat and sugary for you, but without getting them to eat their broccoli to say, to learn more on this, you probably would have to read under the first headline into the second paragraph. So how do you—what do you think a good solution is to that conundrum with meeting teens where they are?

Stephanie Edgerly: Oh, that's such a—I have such an immediate reaction to the phrase meeting people where they are because I want to say, oh, wouldn't it be nice for people to just meet me where I am? Why do we always have to go where people are? But I definitely have said that phrase. And I definitely understand the logic behind it. Two things that immediately pop to mind. One is the little contrarian perspective that I always like to advocate. At Medill, we have a night lab. And they specialize in all of these innovations and how to create news experiences that are frictionless. It's a big word right now and doing all this UX testing to make sure that people don't bump into things and seamlessly go from one thing to another. And because I like to be the pesky professor, sometimes I like to ask these questions of whether it would be better if people had more friction. And maybe we have prioritized such seamless transitions from this to this to this. And oh, here's another thing. And keep going. Don't stop.

That it would actually be better—and I mean, this depends on how you're defining better. And largely, I tend to define better not in a program or product development way but in a democracy way. Maybe it would be better if people had to sit for a second or things weren't so here's the next thing you consume.

If the page wasn't an endless scroll. I think we've learned quickly that like the endless scroll isn't great. And so, for people out there that are more design inclined, I think it's an interesting thing to think about where the efficiencies of design meet or rub up against human processing. And what we need to become more knowledgeable people. And a lot of what we know there through learning sciences is the importance of reflection, and the importance of asking questions, and elaborating, and piecing together connections from the past, and other stories that you may have read. And so, one of the things I like to ask students journalists in my class is, how do you create an experience? Or how do you write a single story or make a video story that induces reflection or prompts people to elaborate on their own experiences which will help them retain information? And the end product might not be the fanciest slickest design. But certainly, there's a marriage there. I'm not saying don't—design is unimportant, and we shouldn't problem solve the challenges and the obstacles that users encounter when using platforms or tools. But I do think it's worth thinking about, what is the objective? And if it is learning, or if it is empathy, or if it is awareness, how do we prioritize elements of learning that would help that outcome?

And it might not be the same outcome that enables time spent on the app. And then the other response—sorry, just to piggyback really quick, is especially when I talk to news avoiders, one of the things I suggest for this short attention span is it feels good to finish. And I think the endless scroll and the, oh, my gosh, when have I consumed enough news for today. The problem with that is you just don't know when you've done it. When have I read the news? When am I done? And that was the great thing about the newspaper, you finished it. Or a news program that you watch on TV, it ends. But for an online environment, what does that mean? And so, I think coming up with these rules like you're going to read five stories. And you do that a day you're done. Let's just go with five. I think that was the real brilliance of the discover function in Snapchat was it kept it small. You read these five stories and then that's it. We're not pushing any more for the day. You did it. And so, I think that model works really well with people who don't have regular habits of consuming a lot of news, maybe it's three. I don't mean to say five is the right answer. But I think it's get that benefit of doing it. It's similar to habit building with running or exercising. Start off with a goal that you can accomplish. And you can feel good about yourself for doing it. And so that might be, read three stories. And all the way read them, not just scroll read them but really read three stories. And that's it, then you're good for the day.

Leah Dajches: And that's a sentiment we talk a lot with our news literacy ambassadors as part of the News Literacy Initiative is they often share that they set aside time in the morning. They set a timer. And they have a couple of websites they like to look at or some of our ambassadors say they'll listen to a podcast specifically because it's done. And I've done it. I've put in that work. But we're talking—I want to continue the conversation thinking about news engagement and schools. And so, in the news socialization study, 75% of the surveyed teens said they discussed news stories in class. And 62% followed news as part of a class assignment. From a news literacy perspective, I thought that was pretty cool. I found that encouraging. But at the same time, only 44% of teens said they created a news story about an issue or event as part of a class assignment. And only 31% said they learned about the job of a reporter in class. So there seems to be this discrepancy with the teens you surveyed between news discussion and hands on activities in schools. And I'm wondering, why do you think this might be the case.

Stephanie Edgerly: I mean, a lot of it, anytime you're doing a nationwide survey, you run up against the variabilities or the differences state by state in educational requirements. And I think, like Illinois, for example, has legislated media literacy in its high school classes. And so, I think that gives a solid background and some resources to help teachers do this. If you don't have that, if you're a teacher there left on your own to integrate this into your classes, I do think discussions about current events are the easiest to draw connections to. At the same time, I worry about that a little bit because that's also what we hear from teachers a lot about what they're most nervous about. Especially, I mean, I don't want to—I keep mentioning it, but I don't want to mention the presidential election again. But I am really empathetic to teachers that are going to want to and part of their class is to bring in current events into their classrooms or when they're talking about politics and government. They will use an election as the context to fuel those discussions. And what is that environment like? What are those discussions like?

So, it can be really rife for a little unease for teachers and I'm sure also students. But I do think these discussion-based activities are the easiest to integrate if you don't have formal curriculum to support some of the deeper media literacy activities.

Matt Jordan: You study news aversion. And you've done polls of teens. Are there things that teens avoid? And do you have a sense of why they avoid it, or what they avoid, and why they avoid it?

Stephanie Edgerly: Yeah, so from this study we did, we developed a typology of four different types of news consumers and by far the largest portion. And it was—let's see. I can tell you specifically it was 57% of teens in that study, in the socialization study were what we call news minimalists. And so, they were behind or below the average across all of those 22 news items that I was discussing. So, it's not just these teens aren't consuming newspapers. It was really a wide net of big umbrella of news options. And they're really not consuming them. So why? And for me, this is an important question. I started out with this focus on news aversion, or news avoidance, or news minimalism among adults. And so, for me, it's really important to see that this starts early. This is already happening. If 57% of teens are already a news minimalist, it's not like they're going to turn 18 and be like, you know what I should do? I have this urge to buy a print newspaper. It's just not going to happen. So why or who are these people is a really important question. And then what could we potentially do to change that. So, one of the things I was focusing on in this study, which I touched on a little bit at the beginning was the news rich environments that teens inhabit. And when we take a socialization perspective, there's this idea that certain environments that teens inhabit, if they're news rich, there's a greater opportunity for teens to observe the rewards of news consumption or how to consume news and see it as something that they should try out in their own lives. And so there tends to be three big spaces where there's socialization or where you could encounter a news rich environment if you're a teen. The first one and arguably the strongest one is at home. What are you introduced to by your parents? Are they consuming news? Do they encourage you to consume news? This is not a controversial statement, but parents are the initial creators of their teens' media environments. Now as children get older, and they enter adolescence, other spaces and other people can take away from that influence. And there, we get the second space, which is peer groups. And the norms or the expectations of our friend groups can exert power on what we think is good behavior. So, do your friends consume news? Do your friends talk about news? Do your friends think it's important to consume news? All of that can matter. And then the last thing is schools. and you can see how schools become a really important space if you're lacking the other two. If you are from a house where your parents don't consume news and your friends don't think news is really important, well then schools become a really important place for you to encounter news, or see the value of news modeled for you, or get some of the skills needed to consume news. So, to your initial question of, who are news avoiders or news minimalists? These 57% of teens across the board say their parents don't consume news. Their friends don't consume news. And they don't encounter news in school.

Leah Dajches: I guess I was just surprised by that and then a little disheartened. And I think, naturally, I want to ask, well, what do we do about it? As educators, as working on the News Literacy Initiative here at Penn State, what do we do about that? How can we help share that roadmap with news avoiders? How can we encourage people to be engaged with news without telling them, sign up for the New York Times?

Stephanie Edgerly: Yeah, I think that question is exactly the one that we should be grappling with because frankly grappling with it for 25-year-olds or 30-year-olds is too late. And so, yeah. I mean, I gravitate towards schools and peer groups as the most accessible way of going about this. And I try to be realistic. There's always going to be news avoiders. There's always going to be news minimalists. But I do think we've seen some pulling back across the board in support in schools for news-based curriculum. And I'm sure that the older of us might remember the newspapers in education policy, which actually had newspapers delivered to your classroom. And your teacher—I'm going to sound really super old now, had a VCR and plugged in the broadcast news tape. And you all watched it in your social studies class. And as we've seen newspapers not support those initiatives, pull back from those initiatives because they don't have the money anymore. They were never profitable. They just thought of it—I'll speak from the Chicago context in talking to a lot of people in the Tribune. They thought of those not as moneymakers but as community outreach. They were doing it to be good citizens of the community not because they made any money. But as the financial situation has gotten dire, those things had to be cut. And I think in some ways, that's news organizations cutting off their hand, so to speak. You're losing that key touch point with some teens that are really important. I get really uncomfortable when the strongest connection for teens to consume news is having a parent that consumes news. I think, well, that's cut along some socioeconomic lines. And so, while there are some really cool incentives for that, I think about the New York Times for kids section. And how that is a really smart model to be like, hey, we've got our existing subscribers of adults. Let's create something so these parents can socialize their kids into consuming news. I think that's smart. I think that is something news organizations should be thinking about for their existing consumers of how can they create, not all the time but a product that their current users can socialize their future audiences into. But for me, the big structural point is schools. How do we get news-based curriculum into schools? I think 40% of schools—only 40% of schools having a student run publication, that to me seems low. And then I think maybe the more creative one and this is where I think smarter people than me will have some good ideas for this, but how do we tap into that peer group market? How do we create—I'm going to sound so uncool saying this, but how do we make news cool among certain friend groups?

Leah Dajches: So, I'm really interested in the role of celebrities and social media influencers. And you've talked about the socialization of teens, newsiness, maybe that's the term, going from parents, peers, schools. And the whole time we've been talking about it, I've just been curious to think about your thoughts or what are your thoughts on the roles as to where do celebrities or influencers fit in encouraging or even discouraging news engagement? For me, when Taylor Swift—I always had to bring her out. When she publicly was talking about politics for the first time, I was like, oh, my god. Politics is cool. I want to do that too. It spoke to me as a teen. And so, I'm curious what your thoughts are on celebrities, influencers, and teens news engagement, newsness.

Stephanie Edgerly: Yeah, I'm pro with some caveats. I think it always comes back to this quality question. For me, I think, oftentimes, people associate politics with very traditional notions. Washington, Democrats, Republicans arguing, Trump, Biden, yuck. Not for me. And one of the strongest attitudes that I found in a study I did in the 2016 election among young adults in why they did not consume news was this attitude that news is not made for someone like me. And we also know that political interest is so highly correlated to news consumption. But political interest starts early. And you're either somebody that identifies as being into politics or you're somebody that's like, politics, not for me. That's for those people I see yelling at each other all the time. And so how do you get people into this cycle? How do you get people interested in politics or thinking that news is for them? And then consuming news, and then thinking news is for them, and then being interested in politics. And so, there's this reinforcing cycle that we know exists. But how do you get people into that cycle? And so, for me, there are many different entry points. We were just talking about schools and how that can be won. But I think one of the more naturally occurring ones are celebrities or influencers. And that's what I think is really fun about today's media environment and why I spend 22 survey questions asking people about news consumption because I think people learn about the world around them and become excited about the world around them in some really surprising ways. And it may not always be what we call news, or we might not always call it quality. And it may not even be quality information. But for me, there's so much energy behind getting excited about something or realizing that something might be for you. Being like, Taylor mentioned this. And now, I've clicked on this link that she shared. And I met a voter registration form. And how powerful is that for someone who has previously been deemed unattractive and not a likely voter by both political parties? And so that's where I get excited. That's where I want to be careful that we don't finger wag too hard with influencers. Yuck. I think, yes, sure. There are some many, many cases of influencer culture sharing misinformation and disinformation. And we definitely really need media literacy. So, students, we all are aware of the low-quality information that can be shared by influencers. But I don't want us to be completely dismissive of the possibilities of getting somebody excited or getting somebody into that reinforcing cycle of news consumption.

Matt Jordan: That's an exciting thing to think about. And I think we'll end with that and say, thank you so much for joining us today and for sharing your insights.

Stephanie Edgerly: Thank you so much for having me.

Matt Jordan: That was a really interesting topic and a really interesting talk to think about these issues in relation to what we've been talking about for the last season about this just as all of this relates to kids. So, what are some of your takeaways from that?

Leah Dajches: Yeah, I really enjoyed this conversation. There was a lot of various things that we talked about. But some things that are really sticking with me is this idea of news to use and how that can be very, I think, attractive to teens is there are things they need to know, that they can use from the news. But then also this idea of helping to encourage teens to engage with news, not just on mobile technologies but print and going to various, diverse outlets that they can start to begin to curate a healthy news diet. What about you, Matt?

Matt Jordan: I'm always a little suspicious of demographic studies because I think that when we push on them, in the end, people aren't all that different. And I think one of the things that came from her is that teens are often watching the news with their parents and are often in the same ecosystem that everybody else is. And some of the things that make news engaging and interesting and exciting for teens are the same things that make it exciting and engaging for everyone else.

Leah Dajches: That's it for this episode of News Over Noise. Our guest was Stephanie Edgerly, a professor and associate dean of research at Northwestern University. To learn more, visit newsovernoise.org. I'm Leah Dajches.

Matt Jordan: I'm Matt Jordan.

Leah Dajches: Until next time, stay well and well-informed.

Matt Jordan: News Over Noise is produced by the Penn State Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications and WPSU. This program has been funded by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost at Penn State and is part of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative.

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