...but in a way that fits their lives."

Q&A with Lisbeth Nizet, Head of Future Audiences Monetization, Mediahuis (Antwerpen, BE)

Alexandra Borchardt: Liesbeth, you are Head of Future Audiences Monetization at Mediahuis, a pioneering role created to explore and validate opportunities for engaging young people with news. Why was that needed?   

Lisbeth Nizet: Our organization has a long tradition of bringing people to our platforms and monetizing them there. But now a whole world of news is created outside on third-party-platforms. It was important to raise awareness, but also to force concrete choices about how we engage and monetize audiences beyond our owned platforms. It’s an and-and story, we need to make sure Mediahuis is also part of that next generation journalism, next to the loyal subscribers on our platforms.

How would you define that: next generation journalism?

Young people often don’t feel represented by traditional newspapers. News creators for example are much better at establishing that connection. Our newsrooms needed to understand that it is not enough to create something that is relevant for society, but if we want to reach younger people, it also needs to be relevant for the audiences they are creating it for. That requires different formats, different voices, and different success metrics.

You created SPILNEWS, a brand by young people for young people that is serving audiences on social media platforms, namely TikTok and Instagram. What made you do this? 

Developing formats for young people that fit all our brands didn’t work out, because every brand has its tone of voice and its way to look at who it wants to be for younger audiences. In 2025 we made the strategic choice to create journalism with a focus on Gen Z, the 18- to 24-year-olds. Gen Z is the most rebellious generation, more so than Millennials and the Alpha Generation. They really know what they want, and they want authenticity, they don’t like compromises. If you put only a few Gen Zs into an existing newsroom, they leave or they will take over the existing routines. That’s why we built a separate team, with a clear mandate to learn fast and structurally feed insights back into the organisation.

How is SPILNEWS different from the other journalism your brands produce?

For one, everyone who works for SPILNEWS is younger than 25. The topics they are covering are automatically relevant to them. In traditional newsrooms editors tend to say, ‘Let’s look at TikTok for trends that are interesting to younger people.’ But that means they are writing about young audiences not from their perspective. SPILNEWS is not about making content that is youngish or cool or short. It is about designing journalism that fits how younger audiences actually consume, trust and value information. And it’s about representation. For example, we did something about financial fitness. That’s super interesting to young people. But if it’s primarily about topics that would meet the needs of many of our (older) subscribers – second home ownership and such –, we lose them. You cannot be everything for everyone, and trying to be is one of the biggest risks for relevance. We did focus groups to find out how to be relevant for this group. 

What did the participants tell you?

Three things stood out: First, they told us, when they looked at traditional news brands, they didn’t feel like they belonged there. Second, they said if there was something bad happening, they wanted to know it but didn’t want to just hang in there, they wanted to find out how to be part of the solution. The third and in my opinion most relevant thing was, they said that they know that with TikTok they are exposed to only one side of the story. But they explicitly wanted to have different perspectives to be able to form their own opinions.

We keep hearing young people explicitly appreciate a point of view. 

What we see is that they appreciate different perspectives, like from someone who lives in the countryside versus someone who lives in a city, a student or a working young person, etc. Today all of the creator-journalists in the SPILNEWS team represent different perspectives, focusing on their topics and interests. We have someone who works on politics, he's looking at party programs and their effects on younger people and discusses this with politicians. Someone else is super interested in technology. She discovered that when you are on Vinted – the second-hand clothing platform popular among youngsters – you are able to buy weapons there when using certain keywords. She actually tried it and then went to the police with it. Another person works on inequality and justice and someone else covers human interest stuff, for example, what you do to prevent a hangover. And we work with creators, like the 20-year-old journalism student who has a disability. He is making videos for us on how it is to be young and face all these hurdles.

Many publishers have experimented with youth brands, most failed to attract sizeable audiences. What have your experiences been? 

Thanks to SPILNEWS we are able to learn so much for our traditional brands. For example, the way we work with creators or with advertisers. We have adopted it for some of our regional brands, and it is super relevant. We have people in our traditional newsrooms who started their own TikTok accounts – I would have never thought that these individuals would. And that starts a movement showing our staff what journalism can be beyond the established routes.

It is more about learning than about commercial results then.

Learning is the primary goal in this phase but always with a clear view on monetization logic. For example, we started with branded content. We work with creators who bring stories that appeal to young people, like a campaign paid for by the government about healthy eating, featuring a hockey player who presented all the snacks he consumed during the day. 

Many including most of our interview partners say young people cannot be monetized. 

First, younger people and advertisers can be a match if you do it the right way. And second, from a subscription perspective, it’s important to show young people what journalism is because only that will get them to subscribe with other brands at some point in their lives, it is a long-term investment. So you cannot just ignore them. We know that the willingness to pay for news is low with young people. But on the other hand if you see what they are paying for – Netflix and the like – it is a call for us to reflect on why they pay for something. Creating a sense of belonging is super important. You need to inspire them and get them excited. They might take on some kind of membership, but only if it feels like entering a community, not just for access as a transactional relationship. 

Do you approach all young people alike, or do you segment young audiences? 

The needs of young audiences differ depending on their life stages and their interests, of course. Some might be working students, other young parents. You need to be aware of that and make sure that your newsroom is diverse enough. We analyse the data we get from the platforms and then we adjust. 

If you were advising editors in chief from a traditional newsroom: What would be your top three recommendations? 

The first one would be: meet your audiences where they are with your journalism, not with the recommendation ‘download our app’ or a marketing message. Show them what journalism for young people looks like. I'm pretty sure that when you make them feel they count, you will have the chance to interact with them. Representation matters. My second advice would be to follow the way the platforms are working. It’s – unfortunately - not on us to decide what a great video looks like on TikTok, you have to adjust to their rules. And third, invest in voices, because people follow people a lot more than brands. 

How will AI change all these dynamics, since young people are flocking to AI tools?

AI is a great enabler for efficiency, for summarizing, maybe also for discovering blind spots at some points. But I think it will force us to do what journalism is meant to be for, that is going to the streets looking for stories. What really matters for younger generations is authenticity. They will appreciate the convenience of AI. But human curiosity, the art of finding and telling stories is something really human, and I don't think that it will be replaced by machines on the short term.

What has surprised you most in your work with younger people? 

What surprised me most is that we often think younger people are not interested in news. And when young people tell you that they don’t feel they belong in your news brand, that is an invitation, not a critique. They want your content, your stories but in a way that fits them and their way of life. When it comes to the newsroom, young journalists are interested in so many things, full of ideas, energy and good vibes, but they need some good leadership from our side. We need to channel that to make them grow and to make our journalism grow. 

Context

This interview was conducted as part of our study titled “A miss is as good as a mile: A qualitative study on Gen Z and journalism in Austria, featuring perspectives from users, media professionals, and international experts.”

You can find more information and the full study here.