At first, the shape of the United States presidential election seemed inevitable: It would be another show-down between incumbent Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.
And then, that didn’t happen.
Instead, over the summer, following a less-than-stellar debate performance, Biden withdrew from the race, endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris as the new Democratic presidential candidate. That same month, Trump was shot in the ear at a July campaign rally in Pennsylvania.
But it was that very first presidential debate between Trump and Biden that served as a signal to tuned-out younger news consumers to pay attention.
“Before Kamala entered the race, for a long time, people weren’t really tuning into this election — voters saw it as this rematch that they weren’t particularly interested in,” said Dylan Wells, a Washington Post campaign reporter. “But people watched that first debate and that caught their attention. You had the assassination attempt of Donald Trump, the will-he-or-won’t-he of Biden getting out of the race and Kamala stepping up — each of those moments was so unprecedented. Young voters who weren’t particularly excited are now really invested in the election.”
It was opportune timing for The Washington Post, which had been steadily building a team since October 2021 dedicated to bolstering younger readers through its Next Generation initiative. The “cross-departmental” program was created to “accelerate the acquisition of younger and more diverse audiences through new products, practices and partnerships.”
“The Next Generation initiatives team built several projects around The Post, showing proof of concept around intentionally connecting with younger audiences off-platform and experimenting with multiple inroads for people to experience our work,” said a Post spokesperson in an email. “Positions hired under Next Gen still sit across the newsroom, helping those principles be infused across The Post.”
Their work is now lumped into the broader mission of the newsroom and has come into sharper relief with the looming election — one where a relatively small number of swing state voters may make a huge difference.
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Attracting younger audiences has been the goal of almost every legacy news organization since the dawn of the internet.
It’s tough work. Roughly 45% of 18-to-34-year-olds in the United States never use a newspaper as a source of news. In 2022, only 34% of 18-to-24-year-olds said a news website or app is their main source of news, a percentage that has remained almost unchanged since 2015.
Still, some research shows that reaching these audiences isn’t a lost cause. About 51% of Gen Z news consumers, or 16-to-24-year-olds, pay or donate to news, per a 2022 survey from the American Press Institute and The AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. This goes up to 63% for younger millennials, or those between 25 and 31 years of age, and 67% for older millennials, between 32 and 40 years old.
News organizations have attempted various strategies to reach these younger audiences, from The New York Times’ subscriber ad campaign to Teen Vogue’s rebrand from fashion magazine to political powerhouse. For the Times and Teen Vogue these efforts appear to have paid off — at least in part. New New York Times subscribers are “twice as likely to be under the age of 40 as existing subscribers,” reported Vox’s Peter Kafka in April 2022. For Teen Vogue’s part, average time on the website was up 55% year-over-year in 2023.
At The Washington Post, the increased resources in covering politics for young people have come at a time when young people are more engaged in politics. The memeification of Kamala Harris, starting with “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” and her sudden embodiment of Charli XCX’s “Brat,” got young voters more involved in the discourse. In a TikTok this July, Post TikTok host and producer Joseph Ferguson explained the origin of the coconut tree meme. Reporting from Harris’ first campaign event in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Wells saw a voter sporting a coconut tree T-shirt, referencing Harris’ infamous, “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you” line. It was clear then, Wells said, that the online culture and the political culture had coalesced in a way that manifested itself even in the real world.
The unprecedented timeline between Harris’ late July endorsement by Biden for the Democratic nomination and the Nov. 5 general election also increased demand from young voters who simply want to know more, Ferguson said.
“We’ve seen a lot of hunger for news about who she is, what she’s about and her policy positions, especially when we went to the Democratic National Convention,” he said. “There’s a lot of engagement about who she is given the compressed nature of this race.”
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In August, the Post announced the launch of a new product: a filter on Snapchat that users can employ to share their thoughts on the election. The Post was able to draw from these first-person man-on-the-street-esque interviews as sourcing during campaign moments, like the debate or National Voter Registration Day, when getting a wide swath of perspectives is particularly important. The Post intends to use these testimonials in coverage.
When the Post announced in late October that the editorial board would not endorse a presidential candidate for the first time in 36 years, well-known video reporter Dave Jorgenson created a TikTok imagining the interaction between Bezos and the editorial board.
The paper also recently announced that it would be launching an “aggregate election model” to forecast the outcome of the presidential race and control of Congress “based on Electoral College totals.” This will work alongside an election dashboard with live vote updates, per the Associated Press, from seven swing states.
Technology changes quickly, and what worked five years ago will probably not work today. For example, a 2010 Poynter article on 10 ways to attract younger news consumers highlights Facebook as a news source for young audiences.
“It’s no shock that 21-year-olds turn to Facebook for information more than 71-year-olds do, after all,” wrote Matt Baume. Less than 15 years later, the inverse is true.
Even The Washington Post has been here before. A 2002 article in The Maryland Daily Record detailed newspapers’ efforts to entice a younger readership. In the early 2000s, the Post was branching out with “more youth-oriented syndicated offerings,” like an advice column geared toward readers under 30. The piece opened with an anecdote about the typical morning for a 35-year-old in 2002.
“Five days a week, Tim Nekritz sits down with a cup of coffee and checks the latest news—on his computer screen,” it reads. “Although he grew up reading the newspaper, he usually finds the Internet a more efficient way to stay current.”
This entire tableau seems quaint. That’s a big problem for news organizations trying to attract younger audiences: What is considered modern and fresh changes each day. How do you stay current when its very definition is constantly shifting?
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The origin of Next Gen came, unsurprisingly, from age and demographic data that made clear a warning: The Washington Post’s current subscribers did not “spell a future for us,” said Phoebe Connelly, then the head of the team and now senior editor of AI Strategy and Innovation.
“One of the many successes of Next Generation initiatives was for Post reporters to build relationships off-platform, establishing trust and connecting with audiences where they are, or with story formats they expect, like audio or short-form video,” said a Post spokesperson in an email. “By creating multiple inroads to our reporting, we’re ensuring that younger audiences can authentically connect with our journalism.”
Research also shows that the decision to subscribe to a paper takes time, as much as a year or two, said Tom Rosenstiel, an author and media critic who serves as a senior fellow with The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Each article read or video watched is a step in building a relationship. It’s usually not just one story that causes the transition.
Entering the 2024 campaign, the politics team was an obvious candidate for a makeover geared toward younger readers.
“We thought there was an opportunity to meet audiences where they are and engage younger readers who aren’t necessarily picking up a newspaper every morning or aren’t going to our homepage,” said Philip Rucker, the Post’s national editor. “But they are just as hungry for news and information and analysis and smart context and guidance about how to participate in voting and elections and how to think about candidates.”
While the Post may have originally deemed its team “next generation,” Rosenstiel urged a different approach — at least in name. Younger audiences are not so much the future audience of news organizations as they are “the leading edge of the current audience.”
And though it may be tempting to segment that audience into groups in an attempt to appeal to their interests, Rosenstiel noted that no age group is a monolith.
“There are a number of different personas — there are 18-year-olds who pay for news and look very much like 55-year-old news consumers and are even donating to public radio,” he said. “… Some of those people who at 20 have no interest in public life will develop an interest when they’re 30 and some of them won’t. You don’t know what the difference is going to be or what’s going to cause that.”
Ultimately, the Next Gen team’s work revealed something interesting about the complexities of appealing to audiences by age: What resonates with younger audiences also tends to resonate with The Washington Post’s entire audience.
“That’s the fear — that if we meet the needs of our younger audiences, we’re going to leave behind our existing subscribers,” Connelly said. “But instead, we’re meeting the needs of younger audiences and delighting existing subscribers.”
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Campaign reporter Wells is a journalist both of and for the youth.
Hired in the fall of 2022, having come from covering Congress and campaigns at USA Today, Wells found the beat to be ideal for experimentation. The campaign trail is a colorful place with an ever-expanding cast of characters. When she ponders potential stories, she always thinks of the unconventional, a weird detail or fact that could get traction, like a recent video series in which she asked politicians at the Democratic National Convention and the Republican National Convention for their “Song of the Summer.”
Wells reports not just on campaigns but on how she reports on campaigns. She aims to take audience members into her world, to show them a day in her life, like a very rainy Minnesota-Michigan football game covering Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz.
“Dylan does a really tremendous job of showing what it feels like to be on the campaign trail,” Rucker said. “… There’s an intimacy that comes with the kind of reporting platforms on which she’s presenting it.”
This has paid off in real-life interactions with readers or viewers, like high-school- or college-age students who come up to Wells at events and tell her how they’re using her TikTok or Instagram to follow the election.
As a young reporter taking video at events, Wells has sometimes been mistaken for an intern, an influencer or both. In those moments, she has to explain her actual job.
“Older voters or journalists frequently ask me if I’m an influencer when they see me shooting videos or filming content at events — in fairness, I did buy the same tripod Alix Earle uses,” Wells said. “Still, the best way to reach people these days is to share your reporting on and off the platform.”
At some point, the goal is for reporters like Wells or Ferguson to be not an anomaly, but the norm. Rucker hopes their efforts will have an “osmosis effect” for the entire political staff.
Part of that osmosis will have to involve altering what the definition of success looks like. After all, as Ferguson says, this is an “art and not a science.”
“I really take how the audience feels about something into consideration pretty highly,” he said. “That’s one of my gold star metrics — the views might not reflect that the video is great, but if everyone in the comments is like, ‘This video rocks, I love it,’ something else might have happened.”
Such culture change is a challenge. There is really “no magic method,” Rosenstiel said. There has to be obvious support and commitment from leadership, and the team needs to have visible successes that it can show to the rest of the newsroom.
“It’s easy for people to make fun of an old news organization saying, ‘Let’s create a Next Generation team.’ My dad is going to suddenly start being hip,” Rosenstiel said. “But what’s worse is not creating a Next Gen team.”
Ferguson sees himself as a bit of a messenger for the Post each time he’s engaging on a platform. He relishes seeing commenters who know absolutely nothing about the paper — like those who comment: “Are you guys in Seattle?”
“I’m happy this video got in front of you,” he said. “I see us going to the top of the funnel, trying to grab people in and introduce them to our universe and show them that we’re here.”
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