How Are News Organizations Innovating?

News outlets have been struggling to stay afloat for several years as saturation, competition and lack of interest among younger audiences has waned.

Gone are the days when every house in the neighborhood had a newspaper delivered to its driveway.  Of my eight nearest neighbors, only three of us get the daily paper.  We’re all in our 60s and don’t mind paying for subscriptions for good content delivered in hard copy.

For those who grew up with social media, the hard copies are mostly irrelevant.  That doesn’t mean Gen Z (16-to-24 years old) and millennials (25-to-40 years old) don’t want news.

In fact, a recent report conducted by the Media Insight Project, a collaboration of the American Press Institute and the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, provides insight into how people under the age of 40 are funding news.

The report finds that more than half (51 percent) of Gen Z, 63 percent of those 25-to-30 and 67 percent of those 32-to-40 pay for or donate to news organizations.

As a result of these numbers, media outlets have been busy coming up with innovative ways to distribute news to the younger generations.  It’s why we’ve seen news organizations like NBC News turning to alternative platforms like TikTok to reach the younger crowd. This is in addition to the Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and other platforms that media outlets have previously embraced.

No matter what the outlet or platform, the key for all media is to regain or maintain credibility with their audience as a reliable, trustworthy source for news.