How is it working?

Yeah, no, I think a lot of young people feel like the news is just completely overwhelming for one.

And so they don't want to engage with it for that reason.

Another reason is they have a distrust of legacy institutions giving them news.

And we've seen that be a trend that's happened recently.

uh over the last few decades uh like at least in the us but also in the world as well uh there's a huge distrust of institutions and i think a lot of young people feel that they don't understand the value of news third i think that they're they're not really sure how it impacts them or what how they can use it And yes, there is some concerns about polarization and bias as well.

But I think all of these things, not to sound like a broken record, but can be traced back to the way that we've changed, completely changed the way that we're delivering news.

Help us understand about that, Jack.

How is it working?

Yeah, no, I think a lot of young people feel like the news is just completely overwhelming for one.

And so they don't want to engage with it for that reason.

Another reason is they have a distrust of legacy institutions giving them news.

And we've seen that be a trend that's happened recently.

Over the last few decades, at least in the US, but also in the world as well, there's a huge distrust of institutions.

And I think a lot of young people feel that they don't understand the value of news.

Help us understand about that, Jack.

you're comfortable sharing, obviously, like you may not want to.

Oh, yeah.

Two great questions.

So on trust, I think the reason why we... there's so much lack of trust in media right now is that the tools that we're using to get our information now have separated almost everything that gave us trust in media in the first place from the content that we're getting.

And what I mean by that more simply is that the social media works as hard as it possibly can to promote certain kinds of content that are entirely antithetical to the process of a journalist.

When you're writing as a journalist, you're reporting for an editor who is often, if they're a good editor, very concerned with nuance.

And the social media feeds are entirely, they function the entire opposite, right? Sometimes people say there's been all this stuff about the death of truth, death of truth, death of truth.

There's like two different questions there.

Um, so all of that said, um, how are you trying to do things differently with Newsreel? Um, and how have students been engaging with it?

So Newsreel's mission in one sentence is to be a news app and content app for people who have given up on news.

And we are accepting, this goes back to some of the things we talked about, right? Like, how do you accept some of the realities without leaning into them as an educator, right? How do you accept that maybe our attention spans have shortened without playing into them, right? And what I've tried to do with Newsreel, maybe I have, uh, people will say I've succeeded, maybe people will say I have not, and I, I hope that they are there to judge for themselves, is to try and basically build a platform that looks like a lot of the things that they're already experiencing on their phones, right? Acknowledges that people want to get content, uh, that's multimodal.

They wanna see images, infographics, they want it to be interactive.

They want it to feel like what a lot of the apps on their phone already feel like, which is very engaging, uh, not just blank text on a page.

Uh, but what we've decided to do is make the content all be vetted and high quality, which means that nobody can produce content on our platform that has not been vetted, right? They're all journalists, they're all news outlets that have gone through a vetting process.

So right now, a lot of the content is actually even produced by our internal team of journalists.

If there's one thing that you would want, um, teachers, instructors, college administrators listening to the podcast to do differently tomorrow, um, what, what would that be?