The flutter of a physical newspaper, the click of someone opening a homepage, and the little ritual of walking somewhere to read are some of the sounds that used to characterize a newsroom morning, and you can still hear them in older buildings. It’s dying, and not in a slow way. The Reuters Institute’s data almost perfectly capture the narrative. In 2015, 36% of people aged 18 to 24 reported that their primary information source was news websites and apps. That percentage dropped to 24% by 2025. Social media increased from 21% to 39% of all gateways throughout the same ten years. The destination is now only a stopover. Nowadays, the majority of young people hardly ever view the site, that meticulously chosen front door that editors used to quarrel over.
The real shift is more nuanced than “young people don’t read.” They read continuously and may have read more text overall than any other generation. The architecture of how they come into contact with it has altered. The conventional paradigm presupposed a relationship: you visited a brand you trusted, and you read what it decided to show you. For the majority of those under 25, that relationship has been broken. Nowadays, just 14% of those aged 18 to 24 go straight to a news source. The percentage is precisely doubled, at about 28%, for people over 55. The youngest readers no longer visit the news. They are doing something else when they run into it sideways.
The term “incidental consumption,” which academics use to describe this, is readily recognizable to anyone who has observed a nineteen-year-old using their phone. In between a cookery video and a video of someone’s dog, a news article appears in a TikTok feed. It is told by a creator that the audience follows, condensed into forty seconds, and devoid of the masthead that generated the underlying reporting. The data lands. The brand that created it disappears. By the time the viewer scrolls on, they might recall the information but be unaware of the organization that found it, paid for it, verified its accuracy, or took any risks in order to publish it. The existential issue that the industry hasn’t resolved is that invisibility.
It would be simple to portray this as a simple decline, and many senior journalists do. However, something is missing from that read. According to the same study, 60% of people between the ages of 18 and 24 report feeling “always connected to the internet,” compared to 40% of people over the age of 55. This generation has not become disinterested.
The old packaging—the essay, the feature, the 2,000-word think piece with a thesis and an arc—becomes more and more like a format from a slower world to this generation, which lives inside an uninterrupted flood of information. The essay made the assumption that time was abundant and attention was scarce. The opposite is true for Gen Z. Lots of suggestions, little patience. To accommodate that, the format must change, and it is changing quickly.
Even while traditionalists cringe at it, the media companies that have figured this out are producing very fascinating work. Translating their reporting into vertical video, creative collaborations, and platform-native formats that don’t resemble the print product is now the responsibility of whole teams at some legacy outlets. TikTok has been used extensively by The Washington Post. Morning Brew, an economics publication, founded its entire business on the premise that young readers prefer content presented in an informal, readable, even conversational style. Observing these attempts gives the impression that the underlying journalism can endure the format shift, but only if the organizations are prepared to give up the packaging they have spent a century crafting.
The loyalty issue is more difficult to be optimistic about. The institutional link that supported serious journalism for decades weakens annually when news is something that happens to you rather than something you actively seek out. Relationships determine subscriptions. Relationships depend on individuals understanding and caring about the source of the effort. The financial paradigm that supports foreign bureaus, investigative teams, and the unglamorous task of reporting municipal councils begins to look shaky if the masthead vanishes into an algorithmic feed. The reporting may endure the essay’s demise. Whether the company paying for the reports will is less certain.
All of this raises a deeper cultural challenge that the data is unable to fully address. The long-form essay was never merely a structure. It was a method of thinking, asserting that certain concepts demand sustained attention and that an argument can’t always be condensed into forty seconds without losing the important details. Long YouTube video essays, serialized creator content, and the remarkably intelligent comment cultures that develop around specific channels could all be examples of how Gen Z is just discovering new platforms for that kind of depth. It’s also possible that something is subtly being lost during compression, which no one will be able to completely quantify until it disappears. It’s really difficult to discern which as you see things play out. In reality, these transitions typically occur when both statements are true simultaneously.