A summary of the study #UseTheNews, written by Dr. Sascha Hölig, Leonie Wunderlich and Prof. Dr. Uwe Hasebrink, has been published in issue 6/21 of the journal Media Perspektiven: Download the full text (2 MB, PDF, in German).
Hölig, S., Wunderlich, L., & Hasebrink, U. (2021). Informationsorientierung und Informiertheit bei Jugendlichen und jungen Erwachsenen in Deutschland. Ergebnisse aus dem #UseTheNews-Projekt [Information Orientation and Informedness among Adolescents and Young Adults in Germany. Results from the #UseTheNews Project]. Media Perspektiven, 6, 334–344. (pdf)
In today's digital media environment, the way society informs itself has changed significantly. New information and communication technologies have opened up unprecedented opportunities for the comprehensive information and participation of large segments of the population. This has also changed the parameters for young people's use of news. Especially for teenagers and young adults, contacts with news are increasingly casual. Younger generations are less interested in news and politics and use digital media and social networks for information above average.
The #UseTheNews project is therefore exploring how the news literacy of youth and young adults can be researched and promoted as comprehensively as possible. News literacy is understood as a reciprocal interweaving of news interest, news use, relevance to opinion formation and informedness. The results show that there is no such thing as the adolescent or the young adult. Even within the same age and education group, there are very different types of news orientation with specific characteristics in the dimensions mentioned. This results in four news orientation types; from participants with very little news interest to those who inform themselves extensively.
Despite a rather incidental contact with news in social media, adolescents and young adults continue to use traditional news media to acquire a broad range of knowledge. Therefore, the conclusion of the study is: In order to promote the news literacy of younger generations, it is necessary to strengthen the role of serious journalism and to involve educational institutions in conveying the everyday relevance of news information.
