How to engage the Gen Z news audience

As the first fully digital-native cohort, Gen Z is reshaping how news is discovered, consumed, and shared. Understanding these consumers is crucial to engage the next generation in one of the world’s most important and diverse media markets.

This was the central theme of the session “Unlocking the Gen Z audience” at The Media Rumble 2025, held in Bengaluru on October 3 and 4. Biswapriya Bhattacharjee, Director at Kantar South Asia, presented key findings from the “Reimagining News for Gen Z” report, a collaborative study by Google and Kantar.

The research shows that while Gen Z discovers news primarily through social and video platforms, they continue to place significant trust in traditional publishers. It also highlights the need for more visual, interactive storytelling, and the importance of using GenAI and local languages to reach this future-facing demographic.

“In urban India there are about 86 million Gen Zs, which is approximately 16 percent of the total urban population. The interesting part with Gen Zs is that they have always been with chaos. They are born with the internet, but they have always seen chaos. For them, content never stops. But the way they consume content is very different from the way a millennial would consume content,” noted Biswapriya.

Audience questions focused on the issues Gen Z cares about and whether their attention spans are actually shrinking or simply adapting to a faster content environment.

Overall, the session served as a guide on how newsrooms can adapt content and distribution strategies to build a loyal, long-term Gen Z audience.

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