Why Teens Are Creating Their Own News Outlets

Teens care about the news. They just don’t like traditional media.
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In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, Olivia Seltzer, now 15, noticed a shift at school. “Basically overnight, all we could talk about was politics and what was going on in the world,” she tells Teen Vogue. Many of her peers in Santa Barbara, California, had parents who were undocumented immigrants, so they issues in the news hit close to home. Suddenly the personal felt very much political. “This massive interest in the news and politics came with an equally massive gap in the media,” Seltzer continues. “Traditional news sources are primarily written by and geared toward an older demographic, and unfortunately, they don’t always connect to my generation.”

That’s a problem, and an urgent one. Though a free press is crucial to democracy, more than one in four local newspapers have closed since 2004, and more Americans are getting their news from social media than traditional print media. Keeping young people engaged is necessary to foster civic engagement, and Seltzer wants to help close the gap.

In February 2017, she launched theCramm, which offers a daily look at major stories from around the world, distilled into a newsletter that lands in email and text inboxes each weekday. Every day, she rises at 5 AM to read the news before school, poring over outlets, including the BBC, CBS, NBC, The New York Times, Politico, and Reuters, among others, to ensure readers are receiving an “unbiased point of view with the news.” Seltzer works with an editorial team that helps research stories and finds inspiring individuals to interview for the newsletter, an advisory board comprised of “trusted adults,” and "theCramm Fam," ambassadors from around the world who promote theCramm. After reading, she compiles about 30 headlines into the Notes app, then divvies up articles of the day into sections before writing her coverage, which works to make the news “engaging, informative, and easily digestible.”

Despite the perennial tsk-tsking from older generations who fret that today’s young people are obsessively scrolling social media on their phones, a recent survey by Common Sense Media found that 78% of American teens ages 13 to 17 say it’s important to them to follow current events. Young adults are more likely to consume news through social media sites than they are traditional news organizations, online or in print, but that isn’t necessarily a negative when it comes to news. Teens who use social media are more likely to be civically engaged, and smartphone users who engage with social media report they’re more regularly exposed to people who have different backgrounds, and feel like they have more diverse networks.

Claiming young adults are zoning out on current events instead of zooming in ignores the fact that they’re digital natives, who grew up navigating an increasingly tech-reliant culture. Instead of staring at cable news, they’re pioneering new ways to engage with the stories that meet them where they are.

This isn’t just a matter of style, like how theCramm breaks down big stories into witty, need-to-know facts; it’s medium too. Seltzer explains that she noticed a lot of her friends (and the rest of theCramm’s target audience, which she says spans ages 13 to 30, represents both ends of the political spectrum, and hails from 32 countries) didn’t check their inboxes regularly, so she decided to create an option for people to receive theCramm via text. “I don't think other news sources or a lot of people are aware that young people don't really use email addresses,” she says. “It is actually written by a young person, geared toward young people, and I think that's really important.”

Beyond text newsletters, young people are taking tools they use on a daily basis and closing the news gap themselves. Sofia Frazer, a 16-year-old activist, runs the account @dailydoseofwokeness, which has over 30,000 followers and features story highlights on Sudan, mental health, and the 2020 presidential candidates, among others. After reading about the murder of Virginia teen Nabra Hassanen and the livestreamed police killing of Philando Castile, Frazer realized important stories weren’t being discussed with the depth they deserved. “In this day and age, the news is more inflammatory than it is informative,” she tells Teen Vogue. “We are a very desensitized society that seems to care more about the provocative headline rather than the actual story.”

Frazer feels that Instagram makes it possible to get young people thinking about current issues. “Basically, Instagram is an easy and accessible way for many young people to get engaged with what is happening in our world right now,” she says. “If we want to continue the global conversation about young people taking the lead, people need to know how to access these kids and how to grab their attention.”

“The mainstream media gives us very selective information on just a few topics, and I felt a discussion couldn’t really be sparked with that,” 16-year-old Anjali Kanda, an admin for the Instagram account @brown.politics, explains. “With the comment section on our posts, I leave it open and let followers have discussions with each other.” Admins only intervene if comments become disrespectful, she says, and they actively work to address issues young people would likely care about, but may not hear about. Kanda points out that the Notre Dame fire received extensive media coverage, but her focus was on a fire at Brazil’s National Museum in 2018, which she said resulted in 92% of its historic artifacts being destroyed. Kanda said it became one of their most-liked posts, with around 17.2k likes, 4,000 shares, and 6,000 people saving it.

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Within Instagram, there are different ways of reaching audiences and starting conversations. Kanda engages followers via polls on Instagram stories and records videos, like the one she recently posted explaining the scandal surrounding financier and accused pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. “People also tend to reply back to stories with questions or actually wanting to start an open discussion,” she says. “I’ve gotten some really thoughtful insights from people replying to stories.”

There’s a news-literacy element to young people launching their own media outlets too, which is particularly important in an era where disinformation and misinformation seep into our online worlds. Seltzer points out that textbooks exist for math, science, English, and history — areas of study and focus from kindergarten onward. Media literacy doesn’t receive the same kind of attention in school. “We don't have any source to learn about politics and what's going on in the world,” she says. “We're just expected, when we turn 18, to all of a sudden be able to vote and know who we're going to vote for. It takes time to actually cultivate a political knowledge and standing.”

That’s what Seltzer plans for theCramm: She’s in the process of creating a quiz that can point individuals in the direction of the political party they might align with, a question she said readers ask her all the time. But as technology evolves, which stories are being told (and how we’re telling them) becomes a kitchen-table issue, and Seltzer wants to create even more space for young people to be news leaders. “I envision a 24-hour live-news site, video features, and a team of journalists and correspondents, with everything curated by teens and young adults and written in the signature style of theCramm,” she says of her ambitions. “My ultimate goal with theCramm is to create a media source the likes of BBC, NBC, and CNN, but for young people.”

Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: Meet Zev Dickstein Shapiro, the 17-Year-Old Creating "Turnout," a Mobilization App for Teen Activists