News, Children, and Young People

Studies of how children and young people relate to news have made important contributions to the field of journalism. As early as the early 1900s, children’s and young people’s news exposure was considered with interest. News exposure plays an important role for citizenship in democracies, and for news media organizations, recruiting new generations of audiences is important for survival in the future. From the early days, scholars have mainly focused on four areas in studies of news children and young people. First, the role of mass media as an agent of political socialization and how news exposure can inspire children and young people to civic engagement. Second, the introduction of television and television news increased the numbers of studies of children’s and adolescent’s emotional reactions to news coverage, and the emotional reactions to violence in the news coverage in particular. Third, an increasing focus on children’s rights and children as a minority group has further inspired studies of representation of children and young people in the news. Finally, inspired by methodological approaches focusing on people’s motivation for the use of different media and how they were used (“uses and gratification” studies), a main area for researchers has been to grasp how children and young people engage with news and how they do so in changed media environments. In the last decade, journalism studies have increasingly focused on how children and young people receive, evaluate, produce, and share news in social media.