News Blog

Giving young people a space to interact with community leaders, and facilitating such gatherings to empower them to lead the conversation, can create a lasting and mutually beneficial feedback loop for newsrooms.

By connecting generations and harnessing history to tell the story of Baca County, the Plainsman Herald has found new revenue sources, partnerships with community and historical organizations and a path forward to serving its community.

We’ve seen early wins: Our next-gen audience (ages 18–44) grew from 3,900 to 32,500 – a 733% growth in six months. If a small BIPOC-led newsroom like ours can reimagine itself as a dynamic cross-generational platform, others can too.

Reaching younger audiences has long been a challenge for media organizations. As platforms evolve, trust in news shifts and news avoidance grows, it can feel especially difficult to connect with and serve multigenerational audiences in an authentic and sustainable way. How can news leaders do their part to represent and include community perspectives from members of different age groups?

For us, we knew one of our biggest hurdles to success would be challenging the assumptions, both spoken and unspoken, we held for others. Here’s what we’ve learned over the past three years of gathering multigenerational problem-solvers.

We’ve seen students become more confident and eager to get involved in their communities when we provide nonpartisan information that equips students for conversations with local officials and createe the space for them to connect with those local leaders.

When we began asking what kind of stories still mattered to Baca County, we realized many of them weren’t “breaking news” but generational memory. And the paper was the last remaining platform that treated those memories with care and context.

The methods that worked for Boyle Heights Beat may not work the exact same way in every neighborhood, but we know that trust begins with community listening and authentic engagement, and that’s true everywhere. We are building a framework that relies on partnerships, mentorship and genuine care.

Today, we’re undergoing a bold transformation — reimagining ourselves as a platform that fosters generational solidarity and serves bicultural audiences from Gen Z to Boomers.

Generational tension has always existed, of course, but today it is amplified by several factors, both in our communities and our newsrooms. We asked five summit participants to share more about the ways they are engaging and serving multigenerational audiences.