Part IV: What we oldie news consumers have in common with the young'uns
Editors must change commercial journalistic practices to conquer clickbaiting and trivialization of news
Peter Hulm·
Editors must change commercial journalistic practices to conquer clickbaiting and trivialization of news
Few of my friends – and they range from alt to democratic and Democrat – give much attention to the bite-sized stories offered by television and mainstream media as news these days.
That doesn’t make us much different from young people, who supposedly suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) with regard to news and from binge watching of trivia (apologies for myclickbait title).
The U.S. News Literacy Project has discovered that the too-young-to-vote generation in the U.S. considers news media journalism “biased,” “boring” and “bad” (pdf LINK).
They’re not the only ones.
Amongst us oldies, of course, it’s partly because of who’s in charge. But we all take our responsibilities as concerned citizens seriously. So it’s not just that. We know we need to be informed if politics is to work for society, as we hope.
But the November 2025 report by the News Literacy Project said of the next generation to take charge of our world: “When prompted to consider what journalists are doing well, about 1 in 3 teens said something negative like ‘Telling lies’, ‘Reporting fake news’, ‘Spreading misinformation’ and ‘Gaslighting’.”
The report added: “Many teens believe that journalists frequently engage in the following unethical behaviors: ‘give advertisers special treatment’ (49%), ‘make up details, such as quotes’ (50%), ‘pay or do favors for sources’ (51%) or ‘take photos and videos out of context’(60%).”
The Project recommends teaching teens how to distinguish news versus other kinds of information and recognize examples of high-quality journalism. Its headline: “We’re raising generations of kids who don’t trust the press”.
I’m not as confident as the News Literacy Project that its teaching will achieve the results they want anytime soon. Sarah Scire, deputy editor of the Nieman Lab, sat in on a media course last year. She found “none of the students — even in an elective course about media — confessed any interest in becoming a journalist. A few could name news organizations they trusted but others said the news came to them through social media or what friends shared or what they overheard as their parents were watching television.”
In the U.S., as well, "too few" high-schools provide any non-partisan literacy education about news, she notes, though she doesn’t say how many do. The Project says it has reached 575,000 students during 2024-25 and now has funding to reach 1 million (LINK).
But I’m not surprised young people don’t give much time to the news business’s standard practices. Neither do we, although we used to. And it has nothing to do with age.
I agree our practices may sound like adult attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), formerly Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), combined with binge behaviour in much of our time onscreen. But I think it goes beyond that.
For a clue to this profound change in habits, take a look at one day’s headlines from Google News. These are from 6 November 2025, the same day the News Literary Report was published:
I won’t go on. But even serious news suppliers such as the UN fall into the trap:
UN chief urges world leaders to drive down global warming (LINK)
In fact, what António Guterres also said in Belém was that failure to contain global heating amounts to “moral failure and deadly negligence”. Each year that is warmer “will hammer economies, deepen inequalities and impact developing countries hardest — even though they did least to cause it.” Much more worthy of a headline in my view.
Similarly, for Mamdani, do we need to know much more than that he ran a standard political campaign of putting himself among the voters? The Atlantic piece had little about the policies he supported, just “viral videos”.
More interestingly, it noted that former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo posted a racist AI-generated attack ad featuring “criminals for Zohran Mamdani.” “In the ad, Mamdani runs through the streets and eats rice with his hands as a domestic abuser, a pimp, and a drug dealer offer their support for the politician.” The backlash that resulted persuaded the campaign to quickly remove it from X, Elon Musk’s new mouthpiece, but the story didn’t tell us whether the former Twitter machine took any steps itself to challenge the fake video.
The Atlantic’s journalist Charlie Warzel reports this as a new strategy in the U.S.: “Politicians, most notably President Donald Trump, have gravitated toward posting AI-generated imagery for four reasons: It is cheap, requires little effort, attracts attention, and is a useful tool for illustrating their (often fictional) political agendas.”
None of this has anything to do with Mamdani’s victory, so far as I can see. But you wouldn’t gather any of this from Atlantic’s title and blurb.
As for Peacock's 'All Her Fault', the AP news item reported it as “a subtle satire of the modern marriage”, which says more to me than its actual headline.
There was what I considered real news that day, flagged in my monitoring service at nusereal.com:
Prince William at work
Why feature these media pieces? Because they offered useful information for anyone who clicked through to the original publication:
But like many incurable news nerds I also collect links to the day’s stories I want to read later.
This, for example, is what I picked for my own consumption on the same day or day after – and none of them are short, i.e. Too Long: Read Later (TL:RL):
Parade’s title doesn’t name its subject or relate him to pop music. Here, Parade’s a victim of clickbait syndrome. But reading the article will tell you that Nicky Hopkins contributed to the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” the Who’s “My Generation,” and “Revolution” by the Beatles among many numbers, and he was “the most prolific and beloved session keyboardist of the ’70s”.
Guess who? Nicky Hopkins
What distinguishes the stories I highlighted from the standard media fare? Many of the newsbite pieces seem there to fill the need for an article on the topic, whether the government shutdown, Russia or tariff politics, producing headlines such as these on 7 November:
You’ll need a subscription to several services to go any further on these developments. I haven’t included Gaza or Ukraine because it’s difficult to find independent sources that give you a feel for what’s happening on the ground.
It’s easy to overlook how much journalistic practices have changed in the past 125 years.
A 1901 handbook on reporting told journalists to write “as few notes as possible” and never to use shorthand, communications professor Michael Schudson recorded in his 1990 history (p80).
By 1930 a journalism guide declared that misquoting is often the result of reporters’ relying too much on memory, and recommended making notes as a safeguard, though this was not advised in Europe.
As for including direct quotations into news stories, Schudson records that as late as 1914 a metropolitan newspaper such as the Baltimore Sun could “go without days at a time with no quotation marks appearing anywhere on the front page” (p83).
That changed in the 1920s. But even today many readers do not recognize that citations are not simply repeating what was actually said but enclose the words in “scare quotes” that indicate the journalist does not necessarily vouch for the accuracy of what the speaker asserts. The Associated Press prohibited its reporters from writing interviews as such until 1926, notes Schudson. The sense that interviews are ways of making rather than simply reporting news has remained, he adds.
In general, though, media's know-it-alls who contrast the young’uns with their elders – as to whether they read news or not – go too far. Teenagers may not follow much using standard news frameworks, but neither do we. We all churn through acres of headline news (whether on TikTok, Facebook or Google) dipping deeper into the occasional longer piece that tempts us to read further.
What does that mean for people who work in news as a business?
I’ve noted the trend towards short, sharp media clips across our consumption of new technologies (Our Interruption Culture: what’s the answer?, 4 October 2025).
But I have to record, too, an equivalent trend towards long-form consumption. We often spend a long time plonked in front of computer and television screens: bingeing series such as Dark, following sports tournaments and Battlebots, diving into YouTube productions that can run anything from a few minutes to a several hours (e.g. 'Making sense of chaos: a better economics for a better world' with Prof Doyne Farmer: 1hr15:33), and picking up on long pieces from new information suppliers such as Medium or Substack.
Many YouTube pieces are longer than any standard television programme will permit its reporters to produce on the same subject. Two examples: The Italian Cities That Just Aren’t Worth It (Anymore) 9:47 min, or Why Zug is more than just Switzerland’s Tax Haven 19:31. They also tend to be available for much longer than the current news cycle: 4 months and 1 month in these cases, and 297,000 + 27,000 views.
What this suggests is that editors should distinguish between bite-size events and issues that justify longer treatment – and plan their presentations accordingly. But many websites, aping their print originals, still use a news or magazine format to cover events. The print version could refer readers to web versions of changing news, and web items could link readers to previous stories that provide useful background.
Working on a daily newspaper in the early 1960s, I used my night shifts to add late-breaking stories to the section used for the newsstand posters, on the grounds that we should be telling people what had happened in public life after the 8 pm television news. But none of my colleagues did so. I quickly moved to radio news with its rolling deadlines. We also required two sources for any information we put in our reports.
There’s even less of a reason to be so inactive today when we might, as a result, entice young readers to take in the latest news, instead of skidding through Google News with its stories that are hours and days old.
This is our practice at the websites we run. Global-Geneva does not offer a quicky service, as its stories indicate, and nusereal does not attempt to cover items in depth – I just link to substantial pieces where justified and indicate when a short report is justified.
Google's Geneva News for 10 November 2025
Across much of the Internet, however, you can find lots of headlines that are little more than clickbait, e.g.
The UK’s Press Gazette keeps track of the top 50 news sites on the web, using Similarweb data. “The BBC and NBC News saw the most traffic growth among the ten biggest news websites in the US in September,” it reported on 10 October (LINK).
The top of the BBC site as captured by UK Press Gazette
I can’t start to explain these results, except to suggest that BBC’s decision to charge for access may have been a selling point rather than a dissuader. But these figures hardly indicate a public indifferent to news.
New York Times, a paywalled site, had 461.6 million hits. CNN at 343.4 million did nearly 100 million better than FoxNews’s 254.9 million.
Which inevitably teases us to check out other sources on the alt-right spectrum in September, starting from the bottom: breitbart 30.6m, drudgereport 47.6m, and wsj 71.0m.
Professor Schudson spoke of a “schizophrenic news media” in the U.S. but that wasn’t a criticism. He said serious journalists “need assume only that there is a small, interested body of readers who will indeed pay attention to such news” (p220).
“And the group can be very small indeed,” he pointed out. “In theory, it can be just the reporters and editors themselves.”
I hope he’s wrong. One encouraging sign: the two major projects to improve media literacy among young people came from journalists themselves.
Michael Schudson (1995) The Power of News, a collection of his earlier research pieces. He was also recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award in 1990.
Deputy Editor Peter Hulm is 83. His standard CV is at peterhulm.com. His academic work on postmodern theory appears at pomopress.com. His educational guide to Internet topics features at stepwiser.net. He posts about his adopted home country at switzerlandtoday.ch.