TheEconomistDecember 21st 2019 851T
he presidentof El Salvador gets it. Ad-
dressing the unGeneral Assembly in
September, Nayib Bukele paused to take a
self-portrait at the rostrum. “Believe me,
many more people will see that selfie once I
share it than will listen to this speech,” he
said, adding, “I hope I took a good one.”
Marianne Williamson, a New-Agey type
running for the Democratic presidential
nomination in America, gets it. Asked after
a debate in July whether it went well, she
replied that she would only know for sure
“later, when I see the memes”. So does An-
drew Yang, another Democratic no-hoper.
His first big interview was with Joe Rogan,
an internet-famous comedian with 6.96m
subscribers on YouTube. After it was
viewed 1m times over the course of two
days, Mr Yang wrote that his campaign
could be divided into “br(Before Rogan)
and ar(After Rogan)”.
These minor politicians provide a pithy
summary of how teenagers and those in
their early 20s consume news today. It is al-
most entirely on social media. It is almost
entirely visual. And the content of the
news—“President Makes Speech at un”—is
less important than how it is packaged. It is
often filtered through humour or com-
ment. Or, just as often, it is mediated by
personalities who command huge follow-
ings among young people but are little
known to the general population.
These principles hold true around the
world, even if the specifics and platforms
differ. Between 2009 and 2018 the share of
teenagers who read newspapers declined
from around 60% to close to 20%, accord-
ing to the Programme for International
Student Assessment (pisa), an educational
league table of 15- and 16-year-olds in the
oecd, a group of mostly rich countries.
Young Indians are half as likely to visit ti-
mesofindia.com, India’s biggest English-
language news site, as older ones; they are
also far more interested in videos and Bol-
lywood news. In Britain, younger teens are
far less familiar with the bbc’s brand than
they are with those of YouTube or Netflix.
The public broadcaster “will face a threat toits future sustainability if it cannot engage
young people sufficiently” according to Of-
com, the country’s media regulator.
Some 80% of Arabs aged 18-24 years old
now get their news from social media, up
from 25% in 2015. They favour Facebook,
though the Gulf states, particularly Saudi
Arabia, are captivated by Snapchat. Two-
thirds of South Korean teenagers go online
to find out what is happening in the world,
and of them, 97% turn to Naver, a portal
and search engine. According to Pew Re-
search Centre, 95% of American teens have
access to a smartphone and 45% are online
“almost constantly”. A study of American
and British teens commissioned by the
Reuters Institute for the Study of Journal-
ism in Oxford argues that when it comes to
news, young people are most concerned
with “what it can do for them as individ-
uals—rather than society as a whole”.
It can be tempting to dismiss teenagers’
news-consumption habits. Most cannot
vote, have limited spending power and are
probably incapable of finding El Salvador
on a map. Such sneers are misplaced. A
third of the planet is under 20. More than
half the world is now connected to the in-
ternet. The young are a proxy for the future.
That is especially the case in media busi-
nesses, where their habits drive billion-
dollar decisions, such as Facebook’s acqui-
sition of Instagram in 2012 and its failed at-
tempt to buy Snapchat the following year.
Teenagers understand that technologyYoung people and the media
Seize the memes
DELHI, LEXINGTON AND SÃO PAULO
Teenagers are rewriting the rules of news
International