How the information habits of new generations are changing: implications for communicators

In March 2026, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism published. Understanding Young News Audiences at a Time of Rapid Change, a research study that synthesizes more than a decade of data on the information habits of 18-24 year olds in 48 countries.

It is, first and foremost, a snapshot of how a structurally relevant segment of the public -- the one that brands seek to intercept, that the media wants to retain, that PR seeks to reach -- relates to information today.

Reading these data from the perspective of communications workers leads to an exercise that goes beyond industry analysis and calls into question some basic assumptions about where audiences are, how they access content, and why certain media placements produce real effects while others are lost in the noise.

The starting point: the Reuters Institute 2026 report.

The Reuters Institute conducts annual research Digital News Report on dozens of countries, and the report released in March 2026 brings together longitudinal elaborations of them regarding young audiences. The data come from YouGov surveys conducted between 2013 and 2025 on representative samples, supplemented with qualitative research on how young people perceive information.

Some of the most relevant figures:

• In 2025, 39% of 18-24 year olds indicate social media as their main source of news, up from 21% in 2015. Over the same period, headline sites and apps dropped from 36% to 24%.
• Only 35% of young people say they are very or extremely interested in news - 25 percentage points lower than in 2013.
• 51% of social users under 25 say they pay more attention to creators and individual personalities than to traditional publishing brands. Among those over 55, the proportion is reversed.
• 15% of 18-24 year olds use AI tools to access news each week, compared with just 3% of the 55+ bracket.
• 64% of young people consume news every day, compared with 87% of those over 55. Frequency has dropped by 15 percentage points among young people since 2017, compared with only 5 points among older people.

From direct navigation to social-first: what has changed in ten years

The most structural change the report documents is not in the volume of news consumed, but in the path through which this news is reached. In 2025, only 14% of 18-24 year olds cite browsing directly to a site or publishing app as their main mode of accessing news. 40% find them via social, 26% via search engines.

This shift has definite consequences for those working in communications. When a story is intercepted within a social feed, there is almost never a conscious act of informational purchase: the user did not seek out that news story, he found it while scrolling through content of a different nature. The study report cites previous research documenting how this type of incidental exposure weakens recall of the source editorial brand. People remember the content, but not where they read it.

For brands investing in media visibility, this finding profoundly changes the reasoning behind the metrics. Coverage in a news outlet remains significant in terms of credibility and positioning-the journalist writing about an authoritative source lends legitimacy to a story-but the path by which that story reaches young audiences is increasingly mediated by algorithms and distribution logics that are beyond the control of both publisher and brand.

We had already reasoned about these dynamics in the article New media and PR: challenges and opportunities in a fragmented landscape, where it becomes clear that the multiplication of channels does not simplify the strategy, but makes it more articulated: each platform has its own logic, audiences and standards of relevance.

The issue is the relevance

One of the most interesting passages in the Reuters report concerns the reasons for news avoidance. 42% of young people say they avoid it “often” or “sometimes”-a similar percentage to other age groups. The main reason, across all generations, is the depressive effect on their moods. Among young people, however, an additional reason emerges strongly: 21% of 18-24-year-olds who avoid news do so because they do not find it relevant to their lives, compared with 16% of those over 55. 15% avoid it because they find it difficult to follow, compared with just 5% in the older age group.

This 10 percentage point difference in relevance is a fact that deserves specific attention from those building communication strategies. This is not about an audience that does not know what is happening in the world or does not want to know, but about people who perceive a gap between the way information is produced and distributed and their own reality and view of it. The theme then is to figure out how to bridge that gap between young people and those who want to communicate with them.

For brands seeking visibility with this audience, the logical consequence is that the medium and angle of a story matter as much as the story itself. A placement in an influential newspaper but distant from the communication codes of 18- to 24-year-olds is likely to have much less real reach than that suggested by circulation or traffic numbers.

Creators as the new information architecture

Perhaps the most disruptive finding of the report concerns the role of creators in information. Among social users under 25, 51% pay more attention to creators and individual personalities than to traditional publishing brands.

The report documents that the most-followed creators in the news arena are not primarily polemical or pure entertainment figures, but often profiles that perform a simplification and translation function: Hugo Travers (HugoDécrypte) in France, with millions of followers on YouTube and TikTok, builds content that “deciphers” news for a young audience. Dylan Page in the UK and Abhi and Niyu in India do the same. In all these cases, the perceived value is the ability to make accessible and relevant information that in traditional media is often technical, dense, or far removed from everyday experience.

This trend has direct implications for media relations. If a growing proportion of the young population builds its understanding of facts through creators rather than news outlets, a PR strategy that ignores this architecture distributes its attention increasingly asymmetrically to actual audiences. We had already discussed this - more broadly, with industry-specific focus - in the article Between traditional media and creator economy: the evolution of PR in the beverage industry, where the central point was exactly this: media presidium and cultural presidium no longer automatically coincide.

It is worth pointing out that the report does not document a substitution: those who consume news from creators tend to consume news from traditional media as well. If anything, it is an integration that needs to be focused on in strategies and no longer neglected.

AI enters news consumption

A second structural change documented by the report concerns the use of generative AI tools to access news. 15% of 18-24 year olds use them weekly to inform themselves-a share that exceeds that of any other age group and that, though still a minority, indicates a clear direction of travel.

The more specific finding is in the type of use young people make of these tools. Nearly half (48%) of those who use AI chatbots to access news do so to make a story easier to understand; a higher percentage than the 55-and-over (27%) who limit themselves primarily to searching for updates. Young people use AI as a tool for simplification and navigation, consistent with the same reasons they find certain news stories difficult to follow.

This paradigm shift in information search has direct consequences for the visibility of brands in information. A story that circulates in traditional media but is not cited or picked up by generative search tools has a different effective reach than one that is instead structured to be easily processed and reproduced by systems such as ChatGPT or Perplexity. Data, clear citations, precise editorial structure become variables that affect not only human readability but algorithmic “citability.” We covered this topic in the article on Generative Engine Optimization. (To be linked afterwards).

What changes for those building communication strategies.

The Reuters report is not an operations manual, but the data it contains has definite implications for those working in building PR and media relations strategies.

On media selection. The numerical reach of a masthead is no longer sufficient as a selection criterion if the target audience is young. We need to think about where that masthead is actually consumed, in what format, with what frequency of access. A vertical newsletter with fifty thousand selected subscribers can have more real impact than an issue in a generalist masthead with ten times that traffic, if the target audience matches. We elaborated on this in the article The end of big trends (and what it means for PR), where cultural fragmentation leads directly to reevaluating the weight of relevance over scope.

On the relationship with creators. If an increasing share of young people are accessing news through influencers and creators rather than mastheads, part of the PR strategy needs to think about these channels with the same structure with which traditional media is approached: which creators cover topics relevant to the brand, what is the composition of their audience, how do they construct their stories, what is the communicative register they expect from the sources. The assumption is that, beyond the number of followers, these creators perform a real editorial function.

On the format and attention span. The report documents that young people prefer video and audio over written text to a greater extent than previous generations: 32% of 18-24 year olds prefer to watch news online, compared to 25% of those over 55. 73% have watched at least one short-form news video within the week. This has implications for the type of material that is made available to the media: releases that are too long, dense with non-hierarchical data, and lacking visual angles risk being functional for some channels and unusable for others.

A thoughtful communication strategy must consider that a brand's story, in order to reach certain audiences, will have to transit formats that require adaptations and decline the message in a manner consistent with the “places” where different audiences will encounter it.

The report's subtlest point, however, concerns tone. Young people avoid news partly because they find it difficult to follow, far removed from their own experience, built on linguistic and narrative conventions that belong to another cultural system. The right medium, the right platform, the right time are of little use if the content-even when designed for them-communicates in a register that does not relate to them.

For those who work in communications, this translates into a concrete question to ask for every story you build: to whom do you really speak? With what voice? In what format will it be consumed? The answers do not change the core of what you want to communicate, but they profoundly change the way that communication can take effect.

Did you find this article useful? Also read The evolution of media relations: from personal relationship to digital complexity e How to turn corporate narrative into news.