At NewsFoo, Knight’s Journalism Program Associate Chris Sopher offered insights about young people’s engagement with news and information.

In the video above, find out why age is just a number and not necessarily an indicator of people’s behavior when it comes to consuming news. Sopher shares the Newspaper Association of America‘s research indicating that people’s news consumption habits are more determined by certain life factors like whether they live alone or have children. It’s important to keep this in mind because when it comes to engaging young people, it may not work to unilaterally provide tools or content and assume it will work for everyone.

Other insights include changing new consumption behaviors. For example, even though young people spend less time reading the news, those who do are actually more likely to get it from a variety of sources. 

Another big trend is the extent to which young people want local information. They want to be engaged with the news that impacts them, research shows.

Sopher also shares “why users are king, but kind of weird” and how design can impact the way people share and consume information.

NewsFoo was sponsored by O’Reilly Media, Knight Foundation and Google. It gathered a cross section of people in digital news space to talk about an agenda created on the spot.

By Elizabeth R. Miller, communications associate at Knight

Related: “From #newsfoo: Five opportunities for the news industry” and “At #newsfoo: Fixing foreign news, building products and why change is good” on KnightBlog