Young people as “glocal” citizens of the world. News media representations of youth in mainstream and digital native media

The mutual distrust between traditional news media and youth that emerges from studies on media consumption has highlighted the need for further research on those sources of information that are growing ever more popular among younger audiences. If news consumption can still be considered one of the crucial elements of civic participation, it is important to investigate young people’s experiences of news and the main representations of the public sphere that they recognize as meaningful. We refer in particular to two kinds of youth-oriented news media, in the last two decades: 1) hybrid digital native journalism – positioned at the intersection of information, entertainment, youth culture and advertising – which represents itself in opposition to the mainstream media and offers news content that is specifically designed to appeal to younger audiences; 2) algorithm-driven sources, which include social network sites. In order to examine the differences between these two forms of digital news media and retrace the processes that brought from one to the other we will address two case-studies, even though they refer to two different periods and contexts: (a) from a large set of comparative international data obtained during an European research in 2016, we have selected data regarding the case of Vice, a transnational digital news source focused on youth culture, that was originally born as a print magazine and grew into one of the most successful and innovative media companies of the early 2000s. (b) from an ongoing research on the case of an Italian digital news start-up born in 2020 that is part of a new generation of social-media native sources that distribute news exclusively through their Instagram profiles, we have selected a first analysis of the agenda-setting and framing. Additionally, to provide a background to our discussion of youth-oriented digital news media and discuss the role of mainstream news media in shaping public perceptions of youth, the first segment of the paper will summarize the results emerged out of our participation in the European project mentioned above, by discussing part of the media landscape traced across seven EU countries. Our thematic analyses have highlighted the significant difference that exists between the representations of digital native and youth-oriented media and the ones proposed by mainstream news media, which tend to frame young people as an apathetic or problematic collective actor. However, it seems that the fresh youth-oriented players in the public sphere, where web marketing communication and journalism tend to go hand-in-hand, have turned away from traditional media’s normative tendencies only to fall into other normative representations.