Why Teens Are Creating Their Own News Outlets
TEEN VOGUE – 29/08/2019
RAINESFORD STAUFFER
In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, Olivia Seltzer, now 15, noticed a shift at school. “Basically overnight, all we could talk about was politics and what was going on in the world,” she tells Teen Vogue. Many of her peers in Santa Barbara, California, had parents who were undocumented immigrants, so they issues in the news hit close to home. Suddenly the personal felt very much political. “This massive interest in the news and politics came with an equally massive gap in the media,” Seltzer continues. “Traditional news sources are primarily written by and geared toward an older demographic, and unfortunately, they don’t always connect to my generation.”
That’s a problem, and an urgent one. Though a free press is crucial to democracy, more than one in four local newspapers have closed since 2004, and more Americans are getting their news from social media than traditional print media. Keeping young people engaged is necessary to foster civic engagement, and Seltzer wants to help close the gap.