On the first day of the fall semester at Boston University, Michelle Amazeen, an associate professor of mass communication, asked her graduate students to fill out a questionnaire listing their favorite movie, band, book and news source. She was in for a surprise.
Next to news source, many of her 16 students left a blank. Several mentioned TikTok, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). One named a mainstream publication (The New York Times) as their source of news and information.
“By and large, young adults are getting their news, if they get it at all, from social media,” Ms. Amazeen said. As far as they’re concerned, “social media is exciting and it’s accessible,” because there’s little effort or expense required: just a scroll down a smartphone screen.
This practice — which Ms. Amazeen called “passive news consumption” — is among a variety of factors plaguing the mainstream media.
Traditional outlets, especially newspapers, have closed or reduced their staffs because of shrinking audiences and revenues.
The income from advertising and subscriptions that had long kept print and other local media alive has gravitated to digital coverage, generating far less income.
Tech companies and online media outlets like YouTube, X and TikTok have become supercharged competitors, while political rifts and divisive figures have convinced increasing numbers of people that traditional outlets are biased or otherwise untrustworthy.
The trends portend poorly both for mainstream journalism and for the future of democracy, experts said.
“Without a true, vibrant and diverse free press, we will not have a vibrant democracy,” said Mickey Huff, a professor of journalism at Ithaca College in New York who is also the director of Project Censored, which teaches critical media literacy and pushes back against what it describes as forms of news censorship.
The disaffection with the legacy media will be explored this week by a panel at the Athens Democracy Forum in Greece, an annual gathering of policymakers, business leaders, academics and activists organized in association with The New York Times.
One of the panelists, Persiana Aksentieva — a 28-year-old Bulgarian marketing professional based in Germany who is a member of the International Youth Think Tank, a global network of young people promoting democracy — explained why she and other young people spurned mainstream media.
Ms. Aksentieva said her predominant source of news and information was her Instagram feed. And while she followed the Instagram account of the German television and online news agency Tagesschau, she otherwise got her news on important topics — climate change, women’s rights, abortion rights, freedom of speech — from posts and reposts by friends, young professionals, activists and reliable influencers appearing on her social media feed.
Young people, Ms. Aksentieva said, feel that behind traditional news organizations, “there is some kind of authority or institution,” with an agenda.
Broadly speaking, “we are way more skeptical toward the truthfulness of information,” because there is so much of it, she added.
Besides, she said, “you connect better with someone who looks like you, or is similar to you somehow,” referring to her social media sources.
“They speak in a very authentic way,” Ms. Aksentieva said, using “simple language that shows us the most important issues in a way that we can really assimilate.”
The movement away from legacy journalism is a global phenomenon. A poll by the online research firm YouGov of more than 95,000 people in 47 countries, released recently by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, indicated that only 40 percent of respondents had trust in the news, while 39 percent said they sometimes or often avoided it.
Among 18- to 29-year-olds in the United States, an October 2022 survey by the Pew Research Center showed that half had some or a lot of trust in the news and information from social media sites. Only 56 percent said they trusted information from national news organizations.
The shift is driving the demise of many independent print and broadcast sources. According to a 2023 report by Northwestern University on the state of local news, more than 130 U.S. newspapers closed or merged in the preceding year alone, out of a total of 2,900 that have shut since 2005.
Victor Pickard, author of “Democracy Without Journalism?,” said print newsrooms in the United States had lost more than half of their staffs since 2000. Whole regions of the country are “news deserts,” he wrote, with zero access to reliable information.
As for television and radio, large chains such as the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group have gobbled up independent TV stations in the United States. In August, one of two all-news local radio stations in New York City, WCBS Newsradio 880, was shuttered as its owners switched to all sports.
Local newspapers are “in a state of dramatic collapse,” said Dean Baquet, who was the executive editor of The New York Times from 2014 to 2022.
“There’s less confidence in the media,” said Mr. Baquet, who now leads The Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship, which gives a dozen reporters every year the chance to produce investigative journalism in the state or region where they are based.
“Some of it isn’t our fault,” Mr. Baquet said in a video interview ahead of the Democracy Forum. “Politicians have spent a lot of time attacking traditional media. It’s hard to hold the kind of confidence we used to have when you have a former president of the United States who relentlessly attacks the press, who relentlessly lies about the press — and that’s true of other world leaders.”
Martin Baron, who was executive editor of The Washington Post from 2013 to 2021, attributed some of the disaffection to the internet.
The internet gave people who were “excluded from the conversation” an “opportunity to have a voice, and that was a good thing,” he said in a phone interview.
But it has also meant that “everybody can be a broadcaster now, everybody can be a talk-show host, everybody can be an influencer.”
“Some are good and some are lousy, but there are a lot of them,” Mr. Baron said.
The result is information silos, he said. “There are places to go that just affirm your pre-existing points of view” — even “the most outlandish conspiracy theory,” he said.
“People have become increasingly tribal,” dismissing anything that counters their tribe’s beliefs, he said — including documented facts, the mainstay of independent journalism.
“Not only do we not share a common set of facts,” but “we can’t agree on what a fact is,” Mr. Baron said. “All of the things that we have historically used to establish facts are being devalued and dismissed and denied.”
Traditional media outlets have not helped themselves, experts said.
“The legacy media doesn’t report to young people about the things that are affecting their lives in an honest way: the student debt crisis, what’s happening in higher education, the utter and absolute lack of affordability of real estate,” said Mr. Huff, of Ithaca College.
The legacy media did not reflect a range of opinions and realities, including alternative views that students were interested in, and gave an incomplete picture, he said.
In his classes, he added, “I try to help them understand that in a world that pushes us to be black and white, there are a whole lot of colors in between.”
Mr. Pickard, the author, said that in an effort to stay in business, the traditional media was more and more commercialized, leaving the way open for the “misinformation society,” meaning “an electorate that is increasingly served sensationalistic news coverage, click bait and degraded journalism instead of informative, fact-based, policy-related news.”
There are also signs of what might be labeled “the disinformation society.”
In Southport, England, a 17-year-old boy killed three young girls in a knife attack on July 29. Falsehoods instantly spread online about the killer being a Muslim asylum seeker, setting off days of racist and anti-immigrant rioting across the country and leading to hundreds of arrests. In fact, the suspect was born in Cardiff, Wales.
Many experts suggest that one way to restore trust in traditional media and win back readers is through a return to ambitious and aggressive reporting of local news, which has been largely abandoned in recent years.
Mr. Baquet said The Times was looking to expand and develop its Local Investigations Fellowship, which is in its second year.
“The kind of service journalism that local news used to deliver is not being delivered,” Mr. Baquet said, and “people have lost touch with journalism that’s close to them.”
Why does that matter? Because “so many of the national issues that the country is struggling with are actually local issues writ large,” he said.
But mainstream media also has to do more to adapt to the ways people consume news, he said.
“The part that we have to work on,” Mr. Baquet said, is figuring out how to be on “the platforms where young people get their news” and how to “tell our stories in a different way,” using more images and video.
“We had, over generations, developed the habit of expecting the readers to come to us,” he said. But the last decade has shown that media organizations have “to go to the readers.”
“We have to fight for every reader,” Mr. Baquet said.
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