Meet Today's Young News Users: An Exploration of How Young News Users Assess Which News Providers Are Worth Their While in Today's High-Choice News Landscape

If news companies are to survive in today's highly competitive media landscape, they need to stay worthwhile to news users. However, news companies' quantitative audience analytics have difficulties grasping news users' increasingly complex ways of finding and consuming news. This is especially the case for younger news users familiar with high-choice, digitized media formats. To better understand how these news users negotiate and assess news providers' worthwhileness, we conducted 20 qualitative in-depth interviews with young Danes. Our findings show that the participants distinguished between seven desired news services, and that they perceived news providers to be worthwhile if they could deliver the news services they desired for an appropriate level of personal effort. In this way, our findings suggest that an increased focus on specific desired news services can help news companies as well as scholars to more comprehensively understand the uses and preferences of younger news users. This study aims to go beyond the quantitative nature of many uses and gratifications studies, allowing for new categories to emerge - categories which, this study finds, play a very central role in how young news users navigate and assess news providers' worthwhileness in today's complex media landscape.