For young people, journalism is just another kind of content
Some time ago, a colleague told me he was convinced that young people would eventually find their way to traditional media once they got a little older.
I wouldn’t be so sure.
According to a recent survey commissioned by News Media Finland, more than half of 13–18-year-olds get most of their news from TikTok. More striking still is that 45 per cent say they would not see news anywhere else if they did not encounter it there.
Young people have not turned their backs on society or world events. More than 40 per cent say they follow the news every day. That figure is rising.
This may be excellent news for journalism, but not necessarily for media companies. Too much of the industry still comforts itself with the idea that, as people grow older, an interest in news will mature into loyalty to traditional news brands.
According to the same survey, three in four young people say they can distinguish news from other social-media content and know what journalism is. Yet only just over 60 per cent feel they can trust journalism.
And why on earth should they? Journalism arrives on young people’s screens in the same algorithmically curated stream as propaganda, memes, influencers’ opinions, sponsored content and AI-generated rubbish.
This is precisely the change the media still seems unable to fully accept. The old idea of itself as a gatekeeper remains stubbornly alive, even though, from a young person’s perspective, journalism is already just one kind of content among many.
That is why it was revealing to see how Helsingin Sanomat recently reacted to the ‘strong claims’ about the media made in a lower-secondary-school social studies textbook. The controversy arose because pupils were told that media organisations are rarely entirely independent and that ‘they reflect the opinions and views of their owners, journalists and other content creators’.
Instead of asking what kind of media literacy and critical thinking this moment actually requires, the industry’s reflex was a fearful defence of its institutional turf.
Of course, the textbook cut corners: journalism and other forms of communication were lumped together. But then again, isn’t that exactly what young people’s media environment looks like?
Everything flows past in the same feed, on the same screen, often using the same visual language. The answer can hardly be to teach young people to trust content simply because it carries the logo of the right media brand.
If journalism is to remain relevant, traditional media need to stop proclaiming their own excellence and start making the case for journalism as a method of producing knowledge. That also means accepting that this method can be used credibly outside traditional newsrooms.
Opening up the method means showing how a claim is verified, how sources are weighed, what remains uncertain, why one piece of information carries more weight than another, and how mistakes are corrected.
Healthy media literacy does not begin with faith in institutional authority, but with making the work visible. There are already examples of this being done well. In the work of investigative journalism organisation Bellingcat, credibility comes from taking the audience behind the scenes to see how an image was geolocated and information verified.
On social media, trust is increasingly built by showing the reporting process in real time. Short videos, observations from the field and updates on how the work is progressing strip journalism of its mystique. This works with an audience that is wary of institutions but still looking for reliable information. Trust then rests not merely on a polished final product, but on the fact that the process itself stands up to scrutiny.
The future of journalism will not be secured by assuring young people that old media brands deserve their automatic respect. It will be secured by demonstrating that journalism remains one of the few tools society has for producing public knowledge amid the noise and organised lying.
This piece was originally published in Journalisti 3/2026 under the title ‘Journalismi on nuorille vain sisältöä muiden joukossa’. Read the original →
