Teens Abandon TV and Take News On-Line

The time spent by young people watching live news programming from public service broadcasters has dropped by almost a third in five years, according to research carried out by the British media regulator Ofcom. While the average person aged 65 and over watches 33 minutes of TV news a day, this falls to just two minutes among people aged 16-24.

The decline has been driven by audiences moving away from traditional live broadcast channels, where they might watch a popular drama and leave the channel on during the evening news bulletin, towards watching catchup content from streaming services.

Data and the qualitative research emphasise that young people are highly reliant on their phones. Digital tracking in the US and UK shows that Gen Z and Gen Y spend a large part of their waking hours interacting with smartphones.

Generation X, Y and Z

Generation X, the age cohort born before the 1980s but after the Baby Boomers; Generation Y, or Millennials, typically thought of as those born between 1984 and 1996; and Generation Z, those born after 1997. Now the younger generations use phones for communication, for media, for games, for dating, and for news. Across all markets, survey data reveal that the smartphone is the main device used for accessing news for the vast majority of under 35s (69%).

The shift could have major implications for politics, given services such as Netflix do not provide any news.

In the UK political parties have traditionally considered the BBC’s 10pm news bulletin to be their most important outlet for getting their message across to large swaths of the public, which in turn can shape policies being proposed and how they are presented. The BBC is at risk of losing a “generation of viewers”, Ofcom has warned as it revealed less than half of young people now watch its TV channels.

The regulator said the broadcaster’s “future sustainability” is under threat unless it finds a way to engage with younger audiences.

The average number of minutes that 16 to 24-year-olds spent watching news on BBC channels, including BBC News and BBC Parliament, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, STV in Scotland and S4C in Wales has fallen by 28 per cent since 2014. But the overall decline across all age groups was much less pronounced, falling by five per cent over the same period from the start of 2014 to the end of 2018.

The figure was even lower among men of that age group, as only 46 percent said they watched BBC programming.  

The average time young people are spending with the BBC per day across TV, radio and online - 1 hour 12 minutes - is also down on the previous year, and is around half that spent by the average viewer - 2 hours 33 minutes.

The findings provide further evidence that the British media is splitting along generational and ethnic lines. Older people and white Britons are largely sticking with television and print newspaper outlets, while younger people and those from minority ethnic backgrounds are following a largely separate news agenda on social media. However, these figures are similar to other parts of the western world. And few under 30 in th US watch the nightly news, or even TV at all, for that matter. These truisms have become accepted wisdom in the media-sphere over the last several years.

While some news organisations have embraced technology and held onto their readers and viewers, others have struggled significantly to do this.

Now TV networks are trying to lure millennials not by providing programming targeted to a young audience, but by making the news available for the way millennials watch it, on platforms other than TVs. These sites are often ad-supported and viewers can easily access the news from anywhere by simply going to the website. Once there, instead of having to watch everything, they can choose which news segments to watch.

Facebook has become one of the main sources for finding news, but it’s not the only place and Netflix and Spotify are also used among others.

An earlier study conducted by Deloitte showed that those between 14 and 30 spend about half their time consuming media on a traditional TV, the youngest viewers at 44 percent. Meanwhile, Generation X viewers are in front of a TV 70 percent of the time. Baby Boomers consume media from an actual TV at 70 percent and 88 percent, respectively.

Gen Z and Gen Y as well as significant overlaps. Both groups have fully embraced digital media, albeit in slightly different ways, with Gen Y carrying a certain nostalgia for the physicality of older forms of media, and Gen Z apparently having little time for media that does not display well on a smartphone or does not meet their exacting requirement for relevance forged by Facebook, Netflix, and Spotify.

Both groups understand the importance of traditional news brands, but tend to be less loyal than their parents, preferring to pick-and-mix from multiple outlets.

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