Q&A with Pierre Caulliez, Lead News Creator Exchange, WAN-IFRA, and Founder Yoof (London, UK)

Alexandra Borchardt: What do media organizations need to know if they want to reach young people today? 

Pierre Caulliez: They need to know that it is a long-term game. It's the wrong mindset to come in and say, ‘I want to see direct returns’. It is an investment into the future. It is showing the brand and the mission over the long run. 

Do you see ways to monetize young people with media products or experiences at all, or shouldn’t publishers even be trying?

18-year-olds didn’t pay for news 50 years ago and they won’t pay for it today either. I'm convinced that a portion of young people will pay for news once they get in a financial position and a stage in their lives where they need the news to understand the world and the decisions they make. Now with AI the role of journalism is more important than ever. And young people will see it with misinformation, with the fact that there is an infinite amount of content. News brands have a role as trusted sources of information, everyone will rely on checking whether an information is accurate. 

So, today's young people are not really that different from previous young generations?

The main difference is that when you look at those who grew up in the 2000s as I did, there was not a lot of media choice. They grew up with Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, these big outlets that decided what the culture was. Now, there is a fragmentation of media. Everyone can become a news channel; everyone can do a TikTok. We are moving into a niche world where people consume niche content instead of mainstream content. These niches can be anything: certain sports or politics or a certain cinematic universe, for example the Marvel niche, which is seeing amazing loyalty. That drives the way they consume news and content and the loyalty they bring. 

But legacy media’s mission is to foster the democratic debate, not to cater to niche interests. 

The key to re-engage younger audiences around media is to recreate a relationship with them. Many young people don’t even know that these legacy media exist. If you ask five under 25s in the streets of London today: ‘give me five names of publishers’, I'm pretty sure they will struggle after number two or three.

Media managers often say ‘young people don’t read our stuff because they have such a short attention span’. Is that just an excuse?

Everyone now has a shorter attention span, because with all the content we are exposed to, we have less time to decide what’s relevant. But people are more likely to spend time with the topics that interest them most. If they were super interested in Formula One, they would listen to a podcast of two hours. It is about grabbing their attention and convincing them that something is relevant for them.

You have a new role with WAN-IFRA, building and leading the News Creator Exchange. Have you set yourself a goal?

We’re seeing more and more non-traditional news outlets that started out as creators and are now doing a very strong job at engaging young audiences. My mission with the News Creator Exchange is to bring these creators into the WAN-IFRA ecosystem and put them on an equal footing with editors and newsrooms. The aim is to create a shared space where editors and creators can sit together, compare how they work, learn from each other, and explore new ways of doing news storytelling. We’ll do that through different formats, workshops, exchanges, and collaborative sessions, and we have onboarded 150 news creators and digital-first outlets thanks to the support of the Google News Gap Project.

Imagine you have 15 minutes with a room full of legacy editors-in-chief. What would be your advice?

The biggest advice is: listen to your audience. Get these young users around the table, listen to them and to what they have to say about your brand. What do they watch, what do they find relevant? How do they find out about you? All this is important to know, not just to assume.

Frankly, it’s been a decade that pretty much every advisor I know has been telling newsrooms to listen to their audiences, and it doesn’t seem to happen. 

To be honest, I don't understand why. Newsrooms should create open days where they make their journalists meet the audience, for example. It’s not that difficult. My second recommendation would be to build a human relationship with users. For example, 30, 40 years ago, there were some limits to how much we knew of celebrities. Now, because of how much they share about themselves, we know so much about their lifestyles. People identify with them because they share their vulnerabilities, they're authentic. Some journalists are good at recreating this link and showing themselves as humans in the age of AI. And the third big advice is: do not try to be cool because that's not your role. Some newsrooms are trying this, and I think it's a disaster because that's not their job to be making memes or being funny. Young people have thousands or millions of memes already on TikTok, so why would they go to this media for it? You got to keep your values straight. The formats you're doing could adapt, but the journalism you do shouldn’t change. 

You are 23 years old yourself, but is there anything that surprises you when observing your generation consuming media?

I'm talking here as a pure Gen Z, not as a consultant, but I don't see many people using Google anymore. It's now about chatting with ChatGPT about anything, some do it two or three hours per day. I have a friend who is applying for jobs, and he recorded all his interviews to make him better at it. The new tools that AI offers will change the way we consume information. And one thing that scares me a lot is the trust we put into these tools.

What about social media? Data says we reached peak social media consumption in 2022. 

There is obviously a fatigue of consuming social media, consuming TikTok, but it's not going to change the impact. Some young people I know are quite scared of how they consume these sorts of media for hours without even noticing. A lot of people are trying to quit social media, but they don’t manage because of the way these media are designed, they give us so much dopamine. 

Are there any missing conversations around young people and media consumption?

We are not discussing the event side of things enough. Events offer quite a good opportunity to familiarize young people with your brand. For example, a news brand in France sponsors a student congress that helps students to choose their course of study. When a person goes to a specific event, they are ten times more likely to remember the brand than if they were just seeing YouTube shorts of the same brand for 10 seconds. It creates value to build connections with different types of events across the life span of a person.

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.