One story, every screen: why multi-format publishing is no longer optional

New research from the Reuters Institute lays bare what publishers already sense but struggle to act on: audiences haven't shrunk, they've scattered. The infrastructure question is whether your newsroom can follow them.

By Amisa Saari, VP Product Marketing, Fonn Group

For most of the last decade, the conversation about young audiences and news has been framed as a problem of disengagement. Young people, the story goes, just aren't interested in news anymore.

The Reuters Institute's March 2026 report Understanding Young News Audiences at a Time of Rapid Change tells a more complicated, and more useful, story. Young people are not disengaged from information. They are intensely engaged with it, across more platforms, in more formats, from more sources than any generation before them.

The challenge for publishers isn't that the audience has gone away. It's that the audience has fragmented across a landscape that traditional broadcast infrastructure was never built to serve.

The shift to social first: The news consumption habits of young people

Consider what has happened to the platforms carrying news in the last decade alone. Six online networks now reach more than 10% of people weekly with news content. A decade ago, that number was two.

The dominant platform for young people (18-24s) news in 2014 was Facebook. Facebook is no longer the choice for news of the youth; it has been displaced by TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

Social media is overtaking news websites and apps as the main source of information for young people, and fast.

Meanwhile, the pattern of daily news habits has shifted just as significantly. Daily news consumption for young people has fallen by 15% since 2017.

News reaches them incidentally, algorithmically, through feeds they're already in for other reasons. And when it does reach them, the format matters enormously.

"The shift from direct access towards more incidental news consumption on social media seriously undercuts the advertising and audience revenue models most publishers depend on." — Reuters Institute, 2026

Video is no longer a supplement, it's the format

Short-form vertical content is significantly more consumed than traditional linear or online formats, particularly among younger demographics. 73% of 18–24-year-olds surveyed reported watching a short-form news video in the past week. While this figure is still high for those aged 55+ (60%), younger audiences are accelerating the shift.

Reading still leads overall, but the direction of travel to video is clear, and it's increasing globally. Major publishers including The New York Times, CNN, and The Economist have already launched dedicated video tabs in their apps.reu

The NYT's Watch tab, a curated feed of short vertical videos compiled from existing reporting, is an example of successfully reaching these new audiences. The editorial asset already existed. The question was whether the infrastructure could surface it in the right format, in the right place. Given that the Times added 1.4 million subscribers last year and grew revenue while many publishers contracted, they are getting it right.

But the infrastructure challenge, surfacing the right content, in the right format, in the right place, at the right time, is something many newsrooms haven't solved yet. And the cost of not solving it is compounding.

The workflow gap is where publishers are losing

Here is the problem the Reuters data points toward, even if it doesn't name it directly: the audience now requires the same story to simultaneously reach multiple formats across multiple platforms. A text article on the web. A vertical video clip on Instagram. A package for linear broadcast. A summary card for a newsletter.

For most legacy newsrooms, producing all of those from a single editorial event requires multiple teams, multiple workflows, and multiple publication steps. That's not a staffing problem. It's an architectural one.

The result is that publishers are either underserving the formats that younger audiences prefer, or they're overextending teams that weren't designed or built to operate like this. The individual journalists and commentators winning on social – the ones with TikTok and YouTube followings – don't have this problem. They publish in one step to one format.

The Reuters data shows they're winning the attention battle as a result: 51% of young people say they pay more attention to individual news creators on social platforms than to traditional news brands (39%). The gap isn't just workflow – it's also presentation.

TV-style content dropped onto TikTok doesn't just underperform; it actively signals inauthenticity to an audience that has finely tuned instincts for it. Young consumers aren't rejecting news brands on principle, they're rejecting content that feels like it was made for somewhere else.

The structural disadvantage is twofold: legacy newsrooms lack both the workflow to publish across platforms at speed, and the format flexibility to make content feel native when they get there. Hiring more social media managers solves neither. What it actually takes is the ability to produce separately for each platform without duplicating the story, or the journalistic workflows built around it.

Story centricity is the architectural answer

The story has always been the most important aspect of news, it’s the delivery channels that are becoming fragmented and consumption habits that are changing. The answer to how and where to distribute, comes back to bringing story-centricity into the architecture of the workflow too.

In a story-centric publishing architecture, a journalist or editorial team works on a single story: the reporting, the narrative, the assets. The workflow then handles how that story is expressed across different surfaces and formats — whether for broadcast, TikTok, Instagram, Bluesky, or a newsletter landing in someone's inbox at 6am.

This is not a theoretical workflow. Story-centric systems are built story-first from day one. In a truly story-centric workflow, a single story – a single piece of work – becomes the source for every format and every destination – web, social video, broadcast package, AI summary feed, newsletter.

There should be no reformatting, no copy-pasting across tools, no separate social team rebuilding what the reporter already made. The story must be the asset. Distribution is just delivery.

There's a further dimension this research makes urgent. As AI becomes an increasingly common interface for news – 15% of 18–24s are already using AI tools to access news weekly, alongside using AI to better understand the news, and 3% of those 55 and over – publishers will need clean, structured, story-centric content that can be surfaced, summarized, and recommended by users’ AI platforms of choice.

This isn't a distant consideration. It's happening now. Siloed, format-specific content doesn't feed AI discovery well. Structured stories with enriched metadata do. Publishers who haven't built story-centric infrastructure are already at a disadvantage in this emerging channel – not just on social.

What publishers need to build toward

The Reuters Institute frames the challenge carefully: the question is not simply reaching young people, but reaching them in ways that they connect with, that are relevant to them, and that make them part of your core audience.

Incidental discovery on social media is not a relationship. A reader who finds your clip on Instagram but can't name your brand hasn't become your audience – they've become a view.

Building that relationship requires being present in the formats and platforms where younger audiences are, consistently and at speed. That's a distribution challenge. But it also requires the content to be relevant, accessible, and worth returning to. That's an editorial challenge.

Story-centric publishing infrastructure is what connects the two – it ensures the editorial effort of producing good journalism is fully expressed across every surface where an audience might encounter it, rather than being diluted by the friction of format-specific workflows.

The data is clear on where audiences are going. The architecture question is whether publishers can follow them without breaking the newsroom in the process.

To read the full research from Reuters, visit here.

See how Saga helps newsrooms publish one story across every platform, without adding teams to do it.