Rebecca Roberts, founder of marketing insights and communications consultancy Thread & Fable, explores what can be learnt from young people's media habits.

With plenty of reports sharing media habits and the latest Gen Z trends, you’d be forgiven for thinking this youth audience may be uninterested in news and question whether your efforts could even reach them.

Having specialised in engaging youth audiences and regularly banging on about the unhelpful stereotypes that work against effective PR activity, I wanted to explore this further. I published a research report, ‘What does news media mean to Gen Z? An investigation into the media habits of Gen Z in the UK’, funded by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) Research Fund, to get a sense of where things are moving and how PR can better cut through.

Here are three findings to help you align your B2B PR efforts for a Gen Z (those born between 1997 and 2010) audience this year and future proof your work in a shifting media landscape.

It’s not them, it’s you – there’s still an interest in news content

The relationship Gen Z have with news media brands and content more broadly has been vastly different to their predecessors. Having grown up in an era of social media, it’s not really a surprise that their journeys for most news media are starting there.

They’ve not consumed news media brands in the same way, they’ve had a highly personalised and curated content experience from a young age and their expectations are not reflected by much of the media landscape currently available.

Speaking with Vice as part of the research, their approach to gear content themes to their audience, understanding how representative their talent is and exploring a breadth of formats is so far working well with a Gen Z audience.  

What’s in a name? Defining news is evolving

One of the notable differences I found from the youth survey I ran, was that Gen Z had a different definition of what ‘news’ meant to them. They were most likely to define news as any content that is new to them, from educational, informative to entertaining.

This also links back to that experience this audience has had with news media, which has shifted from purely being something broadcast to us, to all of us having the capacity to break stories online, to directly engage with journalists and explore stories and sources ourselves.

Looking at your content and what it offers, understanding whether it has space for interaction, entertainment or provides helpful informative content, as well as a news factor, may make you think differently about how you package it and through what medium. Building a relationship with a Gen Z audience through one-way traffic would be at odds to most other content sources they’re exposed to. 

In terms of what they wanted from news, Gen Z were most likely to say that they wanted ways to filter news to see more about the issues they care about, and Millennials agreed, followed by more entertaining and light news.

Everyone just wants TikTok right? Not necessarily

TikTok undoubtedly has rapidly grown as part of a social-first journey, not just for a Gen Z audience either – it’s ageing! But there are also significant challenges from a news perspective, with evidence that TikTok’s algorithm might not necessarily work well alongside news.

There’s also a high level of distrust for social media among this demographic, almost the price they’re prepared (or perhaps expected) to pay for a social-media first news experience.

There are also other platforms and formats that may fit your approach. Livestreams are highly popular, as are community interest groups, as found on platforms such as Discord and Twitch, which increasingly are becoming a space for interviews, debates and science communications. Podcasts too, are serving audience niches well, and further fuel that explorative deep dive into content areas.  

Some key checks

• Understand the cohorts within your Gen Z audience
• How can you align your content to what they’re interested in?
• What format works for them and works for your story?
• How do you fit into their ecosystem?
• Are there ways to engage them to tell your story?