By Emily Chu, Hiba Aarbi / For The Herald
Despite living in the age of information, American teens seldom read local news. Let alone pick up a newspaper.
This doesn’t mean today’s teens are uninformed. A 2022 survey by Media Insight Project reveals that 79 percent of young Americans say they get news daily.
With information flung at us at almost every waking hour, teens don’t need to seek out information, it comes to us. When we take out our phones to scroll through TikTok or Instagram, the current events are sandwiched between pictures of our friends and dance videos.
Ask a teen if they can give you an example of how current political issues, forms of intolerance or environmental problems show up in viral pop culture trends. Chances are, they’ve not only heard of these issues, but can have full-fledged conversations about these topics.
Traditional news does not cater to teen readers, which creates a growing gap between the young and old. The type of news that our parents are drawn to is vastly different from the news we want to see. As a response, teens have turned to social media to get the news coverage traditional news lacks.
However, the growing reliance on social media as a resource for news creates an opportunity for misinformation to spread like wildfire. The process of going through editors and fact-checking that traditional journalism has is absent in the process of posting on social media, allowing people to put out fake information. Social media’s algorithm allows this fake information to be widely dispersed within seconds of being published, fostering narratives that can harm people.
This is where we come in.
We are Emily and Hiba: two teen journalists dedicated to combating misinformation and fostering media literacy amongst our peers by highlighting the topics that appeal to youth readers.
Last summer, we shadowed reporters at the Everett Daily Herald as high school interns. This year, we will be returning to write The Teen Beat, an opinion column covering everything from pop-culture to current events with the mission to amplify the voices of teens in Snohomish county.
Watch for our regular columns in coming weeks in The Herald, starting with Emily’s observation on the new Pixar movie, “Inside Out 2”.
Any questions or suggestions for The Teen Beat? Email kate.erickson@heraldnet.com and include “The Teen Beat” in the subject line. Emails will be monitored and screened by an adult.
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