Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. HOMEPAGE

Millennials don't actually watch the news

brian williams local news
Brian Williams in his earlier days. YouTube/MediabistroTV

Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, recently said that the evening newscast was "dying."

Advertisement

"The newscast at 6p?" he said at the New York Times' DealBook conference earlier this month. "That thing's going away."

Hastings, who has been at the helm of Netflix as the company has transformed itself from a provider of DVDs by mail into the largest subscription streaming service in the world, may be on to something.

That's because young people just don't get their news from the TV anymore.

Wibbitz, a company that makes technology that turns text articles into short videos, recently found that only 16.97% of people in the US who watch TV news are between the ages of 18 and 29.

Advertisement
TI_Graphics_how millennials consume news_final
Skye Gould / Tech Insider

Instead, this group prefers to get their news online and through social media. (What actually constitutes a "millennial," of course, is up for debate. For this study, Wibbitz defined millennials as people aged 18-29.)

This isn't the first study that found that young people aren't watching as much traditional TV as they used to. A report last year from the research firm MoffettNathanson found that the median age for TV viewers during the 2013/2014 season was 44.4 years old, which was a 6% increase from the 2009/2010 TV season.

And the Pew Research Center reported earlier this summer that 61% of millennials get their political news from Facebook.

Wibbitz conducted its survey — which asked more than 1,100 people in the US between the ages of 18 and 59 about how they get their news — in September.

Advertisement
Close icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. It indicates a way to close an interaction, or dismiss a notification.

Jump to

  1. Main content
  2. Search
  3. Account