The diagnosis is agreed; the treatments diverge
A Reuters Institute webinar following the report on young news audiences shows that the structural diagnosis is now widely accepted. The operational responses are not.
To respond to its report on young news audiences, Understanding Young News Audiences at a Time of Rapid Change (covered in a recent Media Stack article), the Reuters Institute convened four practitioners. The consensus on the problem was complete. The divergence on what to do about it was the substance.
Moderated by Mitali Mukherjee, the Reuters Institute’s director and one of the report’s authors, the panel featured Tristan Werkmeister, Reuters’ first social-first video reporter; Brian Hioe, founder of New Bloom in Taiwan; Muhammad Adnan Butt, chief executive of the Pakistan-based distributor Dot Republic Media; and Christian Esguerra, the Filipino journalist whose Facts First podcast has more than 550,000 YouTube subscribers and who appears at number 12 in the Reuters Institute’s ranking of Filipino news figures audiences pay attention to.
Reuters: trust as the asset, AI as the multiplier
Werkmeister’s framing was the simplest: trust is what Reuters has that creators don’t. The strategic conclusion is to put Reuters journalists themselves on camera, with the institutional advantages (beats, geographic footprint, brand) intact, rather than handing the work to producers who never spoke to the sources.
The interesting part is the tooling. Werkmeister has built a chatbot trained on Reuters’ stylebook, trust principles and editorial guidelines. It writes vertical-video scripts from scratch or gives feedback on drafts, down to knowing that Reuters spells “U.S.” with a period. The effect is speed: when news breaks, text reporters who have never produced social video can get a draft close to the eventual published version, and the journalist who sourced the story can front the camera. The editorial checks remain. The bottleneck has been engineered out: script production by people not trained in vertical formats is no longer where new video stalls.
Worth holding onto: Werkmeister said Reuters sees its strongest engagement metrics in younger demographics, but older ones are not far behind. Vertical video is a distribution strategy with a youth-skewed payoff, not a youth strategy.
Pakistan: rebuild from the pipeline up
Butt’s argument was the most uncomfortable one for legacy newsrooms. Dot Republic, which he said holds around 60% of Pakistan’s digital content distribution market and serves, by his own account, more than half a billion video views a year in the US alone, runs a newsroom whose average age is 22 to 23. In his framing, vertical is not a format, not 16/9 flipped to 9/16, but a different product: produced by different people and optimised by machine learning across the first 24 hours of a video’s life on each platform.
His parallel was music. Lo-fi, he noted, came out of nowhere and became one of the most consumed formats for 18-to-24-year-olds. Entertainment has already gone through this reinvention; news, he argues, is next.
For traditional broadcasters, the implication is direct: the youthful audience cannot be reached without a youthful newsroom and a re-engineered production pipeline. Most legacy outlets have neither. Treating short-form video as an additional output of the existing newsroom misses the point.
Taiwan: craft and platform promiscuity
Hioe’s answer was the most resource-constrained, and probably the most familiar to small publishers. New Bloom, founded in 2014, increasingly relies on reporters who carry their own personal brands. Its storytelling format opens with a recent incident, uses it as a window into a larger issue, then circles back. That is a craft response to news avoidance, not a platform one.
On distribution, Hioe described the position every small publisher will recognise be on whatever platform comes along, because you cannot predict which will work and which will collapse. New Bloom is on Facebook, X, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, and Instagram. Customising for each is a stretch with a small team; staying on a single platform is no longer viable.
Hioe’s point about trust geography is the one most likely to get missed. The aggregate trust gap between younger and older audiences in the Reuters data is nine percentage points across 18 markets, but in Taiwan, trust in mainstream media is low across the board. “If you don’t study in school, you’ll become a journalist,” he said, paraphrasing the local view of television news. Where mainstream trust is already weak, creators are not displacing a trusted source; they are filling a vacuum. The global prescription on offer, that young audience’s distrust mainstream media and creators are the alternative, doesn’t fit Taiwan, where the mainstream was never trusted to begin with.
The Philippines: become the creator
Esguerra’s case is the one most publishers need to think about. After more than 20 years in newspapers and broadcast media, including at ABS-CBN, he took his political journalism to YouTube and built a half-million-subscriber audience. His framing is that journalists carry ethical boundaries content creators do not, and that this is simultaneously a competitive disadvantage and the entire point.
Mukherjee asked the question every newsroom dread: what happens when the journalist’s personal brand becomes bigger than the masthead? Esguerra’s answer was straightforward. You cannot stop a journalist whose brand has overtaken the organisation from leaving. Collaboration is possible; retention, as newsrooms used to manage it, is not.
The cost is visible in the workflow. Esguerra runs a five-night-a-week live stream as essentially a team of one, leaning on AI to compensate for the absence of producers, editors and researchers. Burnout, Mukherjee noted, is what creators most consistently point to. Nobody on the call had a model for how these scales without breaking the journalist.
The shared thread
What unites the four answers is the editing pipeline. Werkmeister automates it with proprietary editorial standards; Butt rebuilds it around machine learning and a younger newsroom; Hioe rethinks it as a storytelling craft; and Esguerra is asking AI to compensate for not having one at all. None of them treats journalism as the variable. The variable is everything around it: how stories are produced, packaged, distributed, optimised and recovered when an algorithm shifts.
The previous article argued that publishers had spent a decade misdiagnosing a structural problem as an attitudinal one. The webinar suggests the diagnosis is now widely accepted. The harder question is whether legacy newsrooms are willing to make the operational changes that follow, or whether they will keep treating short-form video, AI workflows and creator partnerships as edge experiments while the core operation stays intact. The four practitioners on the call had each, in their own way, picked an answer; most publishers have not.