Download the report

It seems like we’re having a lot of conversations about teens and tweens these days. Or youth? Young people? All of these terms get used by various disciplines, and some even get used by the young people themselves. However you talk about it, it’s clear that public media needs to be ready for the next generation of audiences (and technology)—because they’re already here.

Right now, we’re in the middle of a new research project called By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences. This project is a direct response to a desire expressed by a variety of public media stations to better understand the “missing audience” of young people who grow out of the educational and enriching media programs public media offers to younger children. Our research seeks to more deeply understand the current media habits of tweens and teens and to envision a future of public media that equips young people to participate and thrive in today’s complex world.

The first step of our process was to ask what we know about young people already, and what descriptions we find most valuable about the current youth media landscape. This meant referring to a wide range of research literature, from public media-commissioned studies to social science surveys and direct ethnographic work. We spoke with experts on youth engagement, media literacy, and connected learning (among others), to give us the best baseline for the core of our work: talking directly to a diverse set of young people to understand how they already use media, and how they think about the role of media in their lives. We are now speaking with youth across the country about how public media can best meet their needs in this consequential moment.

While our research continues, we’re sharing our initial review findings in Navigating Youth Media Landscapes: Challenges and Opportunities for Public Media to start a conversation and gather support for the larger public service we hope our work will inspire. Already, we’ve assembled material on the following questions: 

• How does adolescent development intersect with current youth media practices? 
• How do different youth relate to media in varying socioeconomic and cultural contexts? 
• What motivates young people to engage with the media they choose, and how do those behaviors change as they age? 
• At a broader level, what messages about youth are being transmitted (or omitted) by the media in general?

In order to answer these questions, we’ve identified the following key themes to be examined through fieldwork:

• Age Range/Participant Selection – identifying “youth” or “young people” will always produce a range of overlapping ages and identities
• Device/Access Profiles – because public media has an underlying mandate to universality, it is key to explore all forms of media consumption and access
• Social Goals – since youth are likely to use media to accomplish social (and other) goals, it will be important to find common motivations for media use
• Media Avoidance/Obfuscation – it will be important, yet challenging, to capture youth practices of media avoidance, or when and how they choose to obfuscate their media behaviors
• “Incidental” Media Access – it will be valuable to observe what types of media youth might be exposed to on algorithmically or socially curated platforms, media that might not be explicit parts of their intended activity
• Influencers and the Parasocial – we need to identify how youth discuss and conceptualize influencers and parasocial relationships to media
• Information Seeking/Education/How-To – with the pace of new platforms and trends in media use, it is always valuable to reassess how youth have learned to proactively seek the answers to questions or the sources of new skills
• Media Production – given the potential value of public media amplifying media made by youth, it bears observing how youth might be creating content in modes that are not currently identified. What behaviors and engagements with contemporary media are allowing youth to create, shape, or alter media messages?

With these themes as a basis, we’re following this initial research forward in several directions. On the one hand, it is crucial to identify what young people are already doing, how they are already meeting their needs with existing media, and whether new forms of public media are poised to meet them where they are. On the other hand, identifying the persistent gaps in how youth are underserved by the commercial media landscape could be another key to extending the underlying service mission of public media and break from the status quo. This is why the descriptive work that informs research design must be based on advancing core values, and efforts to increase audience numbers is always coupled with a firm commitment to improving communities and advancing universal service. As the national (and global) media ecosystem continues to converge, empirical research that centers the voices of youth in this way will help to ensure that the next generation of public media programming is responsive to their unique needs and experiences.

Patrick Davison is the Program Manager for Research Production and Editorial at Data & Society Research Institute. He holds a PhD from NYU’s department of Media, Culture, and Communication, and his research is on the relationship between networked media and culture.

Monica Bulger is a Senior Fellow at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. She studies youth and family media literacy practices and advises policy globally. She has consulted on child online protection for UNICEF since 2012, and her research encompasses 16 countries in Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, South America, North America, and Europe. Monica is an affiliate of the Data & Society Research Institute in New York City where she led the Connected Learning initiative. Monica holds a PhD in Education and was a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Mary Madden is a veteran researcher, writer and nationally-recognized expert on privacy and technology, trends in social media use, and the impact of digital media on teens and parents. She is an Affiliate at the Data & Society Research Institute in New York City, where she most recently directed an initiative to explore the effects of data-centric systems on Americans’ health and well-being and led several studies examining the intersection of privacy and digital inequality. Prior to her role at Data & Society, Mary was a Senior Researcher for the Pew Research Center’s Internet, Science & Technology team in Washington, DC and an Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

The following post is part of a series springing from the Cooney Center’s joint initiative with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences. This is a project aimed at exploring the role of public media in the lives of young people by taking stock of the current landscape and imagining a future that public media can build alongside teens and tweens. With that in mind, we are inviting public media practitioners who are already experimenting and exploring with young audiences to reflect on their experiences and share their perspectives. We hope these posts will spark conversation, provide direction and resources, and raise up examples of the innovative work that public media stations across the country are creating to engage the next generation. 

As students and educators returned to a very different school experience this fall, my colleagues and I at KET continued doing what we always do—searching for ways to make teaching and learning easier and more accessible for all Kentuckians. Our goal is to create resources and tools that help students make connections between formal instruction and what’s happening in their everyday lives while bringing them closer to their teachers, classmates, and the world around them.

But helping Kentuckians feel connected was a priority at KET long before the pandemic. KET serves the entire state of Kentucky, and our mission is to strengthen its communities by educating, inspiring, informing, and connecting its citizens. Because of our statewide reach, we serve countless unique, often isolated communities, whether in the inner-city areas of Louisville or the mountainous towns of Eastern Kentucky.

KET’s News Quiz

News Quiz, our long-running show for tweens and teens, is one example of how KET meets this goal. Designed specifically for students in grades 4-8, News Quiz strives to provide reliable current events coverage without unnecessary stress and anxiety in a time when news can be scary and confusing. The weekly show is built around a quiz drawn from state, national, and international news stories⁠—stories featuring standards-based content designed to engage students while helping them understand and interpret current events.

The communities and classrooms that KET serves are often not only isolated by geography. Poverty also plays an important role, even in heavily populated areas—and now during the pandemic students from every walk of life might be feeling even further cut off. Keeping students informed about current events by tying the news to topics they’re already learning about in school, or experiencing in their daily lives can diminish some of that isolation.

Many younger students don’t watch the news at home, and even if they do, it’s produced for an older audience. News Quiz offers high-interest stories in an age-appropriate form that create a global awareness for both rural and urban students. Teachers appreciate how the show connects topics in their social studies curriculum to students’ real lives in an authentic way. A fourth-grade teacher in Eastern Kentucky told us, “Some of our students never leave the confines of our town, but News Quiz expands their frame of reference for 20 minutes a week.”

News Quiz has stayed true to its format over its 36 seasons, but one thing that did change in the past several years was its delivery method. The weekly show moved from broadcast in Kentucky only to online delivery and now lives within PBS LearningMedia where it’s available to anyone for free. It’s clear that the service and connection we facilitate are appealing to teachers and students everywhere.

Each episode gives students an opportunity to send us opinions about a particular prompt—our Opinion Question—and the possibility to have their response read on the show. Since our audience has grown, this segment has become one of our most popular. We typically receive thousands of responses to each question. Giving student opinions an authentic national and even international audience each week validates what matters to them. It also shows that not everyone their age thinks the way they do and models a diversity of thought. A fifth-grader in Eastern Kentucky might share something as simple as a favorite book with a seventh-grader in the Dominican Republic, or as serious as the struggle to access clean water with a fourth-grader in Michigan.

News Quiz is first and foremost made for Kentucky students, but it has grown a much larger audience. As public media organizations design resources for tweens and teens in their own unique service areas, we should keep in mind that students need to connect with a variety of peers, not just those down the street.

The isolated communities in our service areas often have an even greater need for this connection. Public media is poised to facilitate equitable and diverse conversations between young people. When students realize they share common goals, ideas, hardships, or successes with students on the other side of the country or world, public media is one step closer to empowering and bringing a new generation together to strengthen their own local, and perhaps even global, communities for themselves.

Allison NeCamp Day is the Instructional Resource Services Specialist at Kentucky Educational Television (KET), the nation’s largest statewide public broadcasting network. Allison manages the use and administration of KET’s substantial PBS LearningMedia presence, in addition to developing, implementing, and promoting P-12 instructional projects for Kentucky’s teachers and students. Allison is also an education advisor, editor, and writer for KET’s nationally-distributed current events program, News Quiz. She holds a B.F.A. in Art Studio from the University of Kentucky and lives in Lexington with her husband, twin girls, Labrador, and two cats.

The following post is part of a series springing from the Cooney Center’s joint initiative with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences. This is a project aimed at exploring the role of public media in the lives of young people by taking stock of the current landscape and imagining a future that public media can build alongside teens and tweens. With that in mind, we are inviting public media practitioners who are already experimenting and exploring with young audiences to reflect on their experiences and share their perspectives. We hope these posts will spark conversation, provide direction and resources, and raise up examples of the innovative work that public media stations across the country are creating to engage the next generation. 

I started 2020 with a plan. Didn’t we all? For the first time in more than 20 years the youth media program I run, WNYC’s Radio Rookies, would turn its attention away from New York City and out into the country. We planned to help young people document what was at stake for them in the 2020 election, running their stories on NPR and locally on WNYC Radio. We partnered with YR Media in California and recruited a group of 13 correspondents from nine states who were all going to fly to New York City in the middle of March for an intensive reporting and media training. We planned to go bowling with them in Times Square. Remember bowling?

Young America Speaks Up

When everything shut down, we continued to work with our group in the 18-to-29 Now project. But as New York became the epicenter of a global pandemic, I felt like Radio Rookies had to help young people describe and document their experiences. I kept picturing NYC’s more than a million public school kids at home, unmoored by the loss of school and community connection, and I wanted to hear their voices, especially when the world outside felt so quiet. One of the strengths of working in audio is the ability to send out relatively inexpensive equipment that is simple to train teenagers on. Filming can often make subjects feel self-conscious, while audio is a less intrusive medium that lends itself well to the first-person documentary. We were uniquely positioned to help document the experiences of young people in New York.

So I reached out to Global Kids, a youth development group in New York, to see if they wanted to partner with us and to help connect us with teenagers who might want to create audio documentaries about what was happening around them. We held an open house on Zoom for students from William Cullen Bryant High School in Astoria, Queens. Within weeks we had shipped equipment out to a group of students and were working with them to identify what they would report on. At Radio Rookies, we don’t assign stories. Instead, we take the time to get to know students and then guide them through a process of selecting a story topic that they’re genuinely interested in— something they have unique access and insight into. Together we zeroed in on areas where the virus has deeply affected young people: education, health, mental health, and economics.

For example, I began working with Daniel, a senior in high school, who had a job at 7-Eleven before the pandemic shut everything down. Daniel likes math, wakes up at 4:00 AM, and loves a good inspirational quote—he’s a quirky and hilarious teenager. When he was employed, he usually gave his mom about $50 a week, and now she was struggling to keep up with groceries and the bills without that extra cash. COVID-19 had changed his family’s circumstances, but what was the story he was reporting? Through a series of production meetings, it became clear that Daniel and his mom argued about money, and that he felt torn between incredible pressure to help support his family and his desire to focus on his education and future. Meanwhile, his mother worried about providing. Being poor was difficult enough, but the pandemic made a tough situation even worse,  exacerbating tensions that existed before the virus.

Over the next few months, Daniel recorded interviews with his mom and his grandparents, he recorded himself delivering food, he made audio diaries about trying to organize his time and heading out to look for deals on toiletries. He would upload his audio and we’d listen together, teasing out his and his mom’s perspectives. Then we wrote and talked and wrote some more. Daniel’s story will air locally this month on WNYC Radio during Morning Edition and All Things Considered. The story is a detailed, first-person account of job loss (New York City’s unemployment rate climbed to over 20% in June and July) and food insecurity (the number of food-insecure households in New York City has nearly doubled to 2 million, due to COVID) while graduating high school and starting college in the midst of a pandemic.

Conversations about how to best educate kids during a pandemic or how to help prevent evictions during the related economic crisis understandably focus on the health, science, and politics that drive decision-making. In that, we often lose out on hearing the smallest and most vulnerable voices, those of kids. I’ve never felt more strongly the importance of the mission of Radio Rookies and youth media more broadly. I hope that as the months grind on, we continue to listen to what young people tell us about their hopes and fears during this unprecedented time.

Kaari Pitkin is the Executive Producer of Radio Rookies, WNYC’s Peabody award-winning youth journalism program that teaches people to report and produce radio documentaries rooted in their own experiences. Radio Rookies is known for its highly produced and sound-rich portraits of life for teenagers in NYC today, producing stories about everything from gentrification to school segregation to gaming culture, all using first-person journalism. Under Kaari’s leadership, Rookies has been recognized by the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Journalism, the National Edward R. Murrow Awards, the Society for Professional Journalists, and the Third Coast Festival Awards.