Young people didn’t stop reading the news. They stopped buying it.

There’s a sentence that kills a press schedule before it’s been costed: “Press won’t work — we’re going after a younger audience.”

It’s half right. And the half that’s wrong is expensive, because it confuses a format with an audience. Young people have walked away from newsprint. They have not walked away from news brands. The latest PAMCo, Newsworks and Ofcom data makes that distinction very clearly — and it changes what you should be buying, not whether you should be buying at all.

Using PAMCo-based figures cited by Newsworks, 75% of 18–34s — around 11 million people — consume national news brand content every month. For the same age group, TikTok sits at 67% (roughly 10 million) and Snapchat at 46% (roughly 7 million).

Weekly, 55% of under-35s across the 15+ population use news brands. And a separate Newsworks/Colourtext study of 15–29-year-olds found 88% consume trusted journalism, with around 70–72% engaging regularly — checking roughly six news items a day.

Six news items a day is not an audience that has given up on journalism. It’s an audience with a habit.

Here’s where the planning assumption goes wrong. Across all news brand consumers, digital outweighs print by two to one — 39 million monthly digital readers against 19 million in print. And that print number skews heavily towards older readers.

Older research once suggested that young newspaper readers spent more time with print than online. That finding belongs to a different era of circulation and usage. Every recent industry and regulator dataset points the same way: for the under-35s, online and social are the primary routes to news, and print is a minority channel.

So a youth plan built mainly on print is buying the one part of the news ecosystem this audience has genuinely left behind — while the part they use every day sits on the same publisher’s rate card.

Ofcom’s 2025 news-habits research found that 8 in 10 16–24s use online platforms for news, and about three-quarters use social media as a news source — making it their main way in.

That word in matters. Young readers rarely start at a homepage. They land on an individual article from a feed, a search result, an aggregator or a message from a friend, read it, and leave. The homepage takeover is not where this audience is standing.

Two practical consequences. Creative has to work mobile-first and headline-first, in feed and short-form contexts as well as long-form editorial. And the inventory that matters is article-level, section-level, newsletter and publisher social — not the front page.

This is the most useful finding for anyone buying media. Young people use social heavily, but they don’t rate it. In the 15–29 study, 80% said they trust information from journalists, and they scored news brand content as substantially more trustworthy than other social content about news. TV, print and radio all outrank social platforms on trust and accuracy.

They’re not reading fluff, either. The Colourtext work identified several distinct reader types — from meme-driven to hard-news focused — consuming sport, entertainment, politics and international news. Treating under-35s as a “light news” audience underestimates them.

The same youth study found that around 7 in 10 young news readers visited a retail site after reading news brand content, and about three-quarters took some kind of retail-related action. News environments move younger audiences commercially, not just editorially.

• Buy the publisher, not the paper. The audience you want is inside the same title — it’s just on the app, the site and the newsletter. Negotiate print and digital inventory together rather than writing the whole title off.
• Go digital-first, or miss most of them. Any schedule that relies mainly on print will fail to reach the bulk of the 16–34 audience, no matter how strong the title is.
• Build creative for the feed, not the spread. Mobile, short-form and headline-led assets have to carry the campaign. The full-page execution is the adaptation, not the master.
• Use trust as a media argument. Placement inside recognised journalism carries credibility that the same impression bought programmatically or through an influencer simply doesn’t have — with an audience that measurably notices the difference.

Sources: PAMCo-based figures cited by Newsworks; Newsworks & Colourtext study of 15–29-year-olds; Ofcom news consumption research, 2025. Figures reported as published; audience definitions and time periods vary between studies.