Young Audiences Don’t Need More Personality. They Need To See The Work.
When half of teenagers think reporters fabricate quotes, the problem isn’t that we’re on the wrong platforms.
I spent a chunk of my weekend thinking and reading about how to solve young audiences’ trust problem. I pitched so much spaghetti against the wall hoping something would stick. Spent an evening convinced I’d figured it out before waking up laughably wrong.
Went to sleep last night with nothing.
So when Kerstin Hasse’s email popped into my inbox this morning, I excitedly dove into her latest piece for INMA.
Entitled “4 ways news companies can build a bridge to young audiences,” she makes the familiar argument that if we want to reach young audiences, we have to meet them where they are: build out thoughtful social media strategies. Be more personality-driven. Invest in relationships instead of content. Get off our collective high horses about where young people spend their time.
There’s nothing wrong with that diagnosis. Young people are watching TikTok for news. They’re going to Instagram and YouTube. They care more about individual creators than news org branding.
But that’s not our problem.
We’re already on the platforms they spend time on. Personality isn’t the issue.
The issue is that young people think we’re just lying to them.
The Credibility Crisis
We scoffed at why young people care more about individuals instead of institutions for way too long.
Late last year, the News Literacy Project conducted a study where American teens were asked to describe today’s news media with one word. Eighty-four percent responded negatively. Biased. Fake. Boring. Bad.
I know “young people don’t trust us” is a commonly trotted-out problem. But it’s not just a distribution problem. It’s a credibility problem. Here’s how bad it gets:
50% of teens surveyed think journalists intentionally make up details like quotes to make stories more interesting.
60% say we deliberately take photos and videos out of context to support stories.
Only 30% believe we frequently double-check facts before reporting.
Think about that. These aren’t critiques about how tone-deaf we are or our stubborn refusal to format news a certain way. These are teenagers telling us they don’t think what we do is real.
Rolling out onto TikTok and Instagram, posting personality-driven, bite-sized news isn’t going to fix that problem. Sure, you might get them to click on that 90-second explainer. But they won’t believe the quotes included in that explainer are real.
The Influencer “Contract”
Hasse points out in her article that young people “don’t just consume news. They trust voices. They want to join communities. They follow creators.”
She’s exactly right. At the American Press Institute, we refer to these voices as “Trusted Messengers.” We see the same dynamic Hasse describes: young audiences are looking for a relational connection to information, not just a transactional one.
Earlier this year, Pew Research found 40 percent of Gen Z consumers say they trust influencers more than they did last year. Twenty-nine percent have recently purchased something based on an influencer recommendation.
But there’s something else that research shows about why they trust influencers: the relationship model is different.
The influencer does not pretend to have institutional objectivity. “Here’s what I think about this,” they say. “You can take it or leave it.”
The terms of that contract are clear. The influencer’s constraint (their audience) is visible to their followers. If they break that trust, they no longer have an income.
Journalism has constraints. Our audiences should see them. Instead of opaque institutions claiming objectivity, what if newsrooms were just as clear about what we can and can’t prove?
How do we make the journalistic process legible enough for young people to decide for themselves whether what we’re claiming to do, we actually do?
That isn’t a personality problem. It’s a transparency issue.
When I worked at Lehigh Valley Public Media, we started PBS39 News Tonight with billboards allowing viewers to look up and connect with the reporters they’d see on TV. Oh hey, this news is coming from Mike!
It worked. Viewership ticked up.
I don’t think that was simply because you knew who was delivering the news. I think, in part, it made the news operation legible. You knew who was deciding what to say. You saw their names and faces. That’s a different kind of constraint than “just trust the brand.”
And maybe young people actually do want something similar. They just want us to be more explicit about it.
Pew found Americans under the age of 30 are far more comfortable with journalists who “explain why they have a side” in news stories and advocate for the communities they cover. Young people say that’s acceptable on social media (63 percent vs. 45 percent ages 65+).
They’re not done with standards. They don’t think every story needs to be something everyone agrees with. What they don’t want us to do is claim that invisible institutional practices produce neutrality.
Let young people evaluate a transparent perspective rather than ask them to trust some unknowable editorial wizard layer.
Inline Transparency
If we’re serious about solving young audiences’ trust problem, how do we make that process visible?
I started thinking about this problem specifically at The City, one of my favorite independent newsrooms in New York City. They do a good job sourcing and linking to docs when they report.
What if they took inline transparency one step further?
Instead of quoting someone who doesn’t want to be named, what if their articles noted in the body: “THE CITY spoke with 12 transit advocates, 3 MTA officials, and 5 residents who rely on the subway in their neighborhoods for this story”?
What if they visibly noted when someone declined to comment on a record?
What if they embedded a methodology note that they dug through 247 MTA capital project records and then made that dataset public for readers to view?
None of that is super flashy. But it’s showing constraint on the process. It allows readers to see if and how the thumb is on the scale.
To be very clear: I don’t think doing that will solve young audiences’ trust problem because 19-year-olds care about footnotes.
Don’t bore them with transparent journalism. Make transparency the content.
Don’t just tell me you uncovered corruption. Show me the screenshot of the heavily redacted FOIA response you had to battle your city government over to receive. Highlight that spreadsheet.
Transparency isn’t citations. It’s visual proof.
The Strategy
Where I think the creator idea actually points us toward something useful is not in Hasse’s argument.
She makes the excellent point that newsrooms should be empowering their internal voices and helping journalists build their personal brands. But that’s not because audiences need more personality to consume news. It’s because individual journalists can make that process legible in a way large institutions cannot.
When you know who corrected an error on a story, see their sources, and actually know their name, face, and general background enough to understand their perspective, it humanizes the brand accountability.
As long as that transparency is actually about the work. Is visible proof of the work we say we’re doing. Not just a Band-Aid for why we can’t show you the work we’re doing.
In his piece for INMA that Hasse links to in her work, INMA President Gert Ysebaert nails this point. At one point, he said: “It’s not about being found. It’s about being chosen.”
Young people will only choose you if they know you, and for news organizations, that starts with relationships. I don’t think that means being on the right platforms (newsrooms are there already) or responding to reader comments (they should, but that’s not building relationships).
It means over time proving that what we do is real. That our process works and that we can be held accountable to it.
That you—yes, you, reading this newsletter—likely can’t back that claim up with half the reporting you did today. But you know your process. You know what you can prove and why you fell short on other stories. You know your organization’s strengths and weaknesses.
And enough young people do care about quality journalism to fix this problem. They just don’t trust us to do it.
So how do we fix that?
Show them the work. Show them where we fell short. Show them the infrastructure behind the people they’ve come to know and love on social media. Give audiences enough transparency into the process to judge the work for themselves.
Is that going to be harder than starting a TikTok account and calling it a day? Hell yes.
Figuring out how to make your organization’s process legible and proving you do quality journalism means newsrooms have to be okay with getting vulnerable about unknowns, transparent about mistakes, and honest about how every editorial decision is subjective.
Most newsrooms aren’t going to do that.
But meeting young people where they are online won’t matter if they believe we’re just making stuff up.
Another stat from that News Literacy Project study: 67 percent of teens said they were not concerned about news organizations sharply declining. Why would they be concerned if you think all journalists are corrupt liars? There are fewer of them. That’s great. Not problematic.
Here’s the problem: young people don’t think what we do is real. You can’t brand personality onto a problem like that. You have to show them the truth.
What is one piece of “process,” be it a spreadsheet, document, or email thread that you could have shared with readers in your last story? What stopped you from doing it? Let’s discuss the barriers to transparency in the comments.
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This is such a sharp distinction. The idea that the issue isn’t distribution but legibility of the work feels exactly right. As someone who works in a field where process and documentation matter, I know how different it feels when people can actually see how a conclusion was reached. Showing the receipts builds more trust than any personality driven clip ever could. The transparency itself becomes the story.
Brilliant piece and 💯 spot on. This should be a 'must read' in every newsroom - local, regional and national.
Today I published a related story looking at the launch of a new social-first health news brand. My concern wasn't the content or execution (TikTok, Instagram, etc) as the publisher will do it impeccably. Rather the issue is that independent health commentators will do it better, and crucially, more honestly. The fact that Dr Eric Berg has 14M YouTube followers and Dr John Campbell over 3M reflects this clearly. They let the primary data speak for itself. Institutional media tends to avoid the inconvenient truths. That's where honesty comes in...