The methodology mattered

To overcome the ingrained myths that young people aren’t interested in news and to explore the new ways news is being engaged with, our methodology had to be different and brave.  

We took a three-staged approach which would reveal, with brutal honesty, young people’s real engagement and perception of news. At the heart of our study was a truly enormous passive dataset, followed by an attitudinal survey and in-depth interviews with young people from across the country.  

Passive data

With research agency Colourtext, Newsworks collected the Ipsos ‘clickstream record’ of 993 nationally representative young people across every website visited and every app they used during November 2023. This clickstream data is a source of real online behaviour — large-scale, highly intimate data. 

This dataset records click by click and second by second what people do online. And what they do next. And next.  

By developing bespoke Python apps to crunch the data Newsworks could: 

• understand the scale of news readership in relation to every other digital interaction (shopping, email, social media… even porn). Our data found 103,646 news events with 7 million seconds spent reading news — that’s 117,007 mins, 20,000 hours or 81 days of news content. 
• apply Natural Language and Network Analysis to every single ‘news’ click to cluster and understand what type of news young people were reading. 
• define types of different young readers based on the similarity of their real (not claimed) news reading habits, identifying five types of news readership. 
• capture every instance where the reading of a specific news article was immediately followed up with related online retail activity. That gave us direct evidence of how news brands influence online buying decisions. 

Survey with 1500 young people

While the data told us what people were doing, a national representative survey with 1500 15–29-year-olds in April 2024 uncovered:  

• perceptions of their news consumption, allowing comparisons of what people claimed their behaviour was with the passive dataset to create a ‘Walk vs. Talk’ index. 
• views on trends in the industry including AI and fake news. 
• perceptions of advertising in news brand environments. 
• attitudes of the role and relevancy of journalism in British society today. 

Qualitative interviews

In August 2024, we spoke to news readers across the country to understand: 

• how news features in their life. 
• the importance of news journalism to young people today. 
• how advertising in news brands resonates.