Youth and News in a Digital Media Environment

Ongoing digitalization has fundamentally transformed the entire media landscape, not least the domain of news. The blurring of previously sharp distinctions between production, distribution and consumption have challenged the established news industry and brought into question long-held assumptions of what journalism is or should be, who is a journalist and how we define, consume and use “news”. This anthology aims to shed light on the implications of these transformations for young people in the Nordic and Baltic countries. It focuses on three themes: youth participating in news and information production; news production by established media organizations and novel information providers aimed at children and youth; news use among youth. Taken together, the chapters illustrate the complexity of news use among youth and offer some rather different examples of strategies that news organizations might consider for reaching young people with news – or involving them in the production of news. Furthermore, the book might serve as a basis for reflecting on the urgent, but cumbersome, area of media and information literacy in these media saturated times.  

Youth and News in a Digital Media Environment consists of contributions from Norway, Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Estonia, written by scholars and people working in the media industry. The target audience of this book is students, professionals and researchers working in the field of journalism, media and communication studies, children and youth studies, media and information literacy and digital civic literacy. The book is edited by Yvonne Andersson and Ulf Dalquist at the Swedish Media Council and Jonas Ohlsson at Nordicom. It has been funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers.