 I think one of the things we're constantly conscious about is thinking about what this generational upsurge that we're seeing with the millennial generation, and I haven't come up with a better term than millennial. So on our team, or my closest millennial colleague, Chris Sofer, sort of rankles at the topic, at the term. But Chris and colleagues will, why don't you guys come on up while they're making the shift. Maybe at the end of this discussion we'll have a better term for the next generation, the largest generation increasingly online. Chris, I'm going to hand it over to you and let you introduce the next conversation. My colleague, Chris Sofer, folks. All right, hey everybody. My name is Chris Sofer, I work at Knight Foundation. I guess I was asked up here to organize slash moderate this panel on millennials and news. As I told the panelists who are the speakers who are going to be talking to you in a minute. I think it's a lot less interesting to ask about the behavior of a generation because that's just a giant group of people and you can't help but make hopeless generalizations and false assumptions about a whole generation. It is, however, way more interesting to think about the behavior of people and what we can learn from them. So the four people you're going to hear from have done a lot of work with people of the younger persuasion, have a really deep expertise in different facets of that question. How do you work with younger people to do different kinds of things? There are really interesting human centered useful insights from their work and they're going to share those in the format of a brief five minute talks. We're going to hear from four people and then they're going to come up afterward and answer some questions time allowing. So if you have questions, please hold them till the end and we can sort of talk together about some of what they've given us. But you're going to hear from, I'm not going to come up in between, you're going to hear from Tron Ha, formerly a red eye in Chicago now doing a night journalism fellowship at Stanford University. You're going to hear from Jared Keller from policy, sorry, Dot Mike, formerly known as Policy Mike. You're going to hear from Katie Peters of Democracy Works and TurboVote. And you're going to hear from Chris Rudd of Micva Challenge. So without further ado, Tron Ha. Okay, let's do a quick game of word association. Yell out the first word you think of when I say millennials. Yeah. Awesome. Selfie. Christopher. Okay. This label comes with a lot of baggage, right? I've been working with young audiences for most of my career and usually when I mention this in conversation, it usually goes a little something like blah, blah, blah, selfie, blah, blah, blah, Justin Bieber. The word entitlement comes up, the word lazy comes up. And inevitably the phrase, I just don't get why fill in the blank. So what does the future of news and information, whoops, that's a preview. What does the future of news and information look like for this group? Are we destined to see more of this or this? There are plenty of broad generalizations out there about millennials. And as the night fell of this year, what I really tried to understand was why do they do what they do? What drives them? What are their needs? What's important to them? And I did in-depth interviews with more than two dozen millennials to get at these insights. One question I asked was, how do you define news? So this is John, he's 23. He lives in Austin and he defines news as something that is fact-based or is new to me. He sees news as being more than information received from TV, radio, online, newspapers and other traditional channels. News could be something he sees from one of his friends on Instagram. This is Hailey, she's 24 and she lives in New York. She defines news as timely stories and events that have relevance for me. Her main sources of news are Facebook, Instagram and email. She grew up listening to NPR, so she'll sometimes tune into WNYC when she's in the car. She thinks the media covers too much of the same kinds of stories. And for Saman, who's 24 and lives in LA, something has to be both socially and politically relevant to meet his criteria of news. It doesn't become news to me until I know how it affects people, he says. Saman's main source of news is Twitter and he tends to follow people and personalities, not necessarily news organizations. I want to take a look at three prevalent millennial stereotypes as it pertains to news and information and do a lightning round of millennial myth busting. So the first myth slash stereotype is that millennials are lazy. Yes, they do expect news and information to reach them where they are, whether it be on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter for example. But people like John, Hailey and Saman are not lazy or passive consumers. They're actively creating and defining their own content. And coming of age in an era of too much information, they've developed their own systems for filtering the information that's relevant to them. So relevance is the key word here. If it's not relevant, it gets tuned out. Myth number two, they don't have the attention span to read or watch long form. Now what surprised me about a lot of my interviews is just how much long form many of them do consume. Matt, who's 22 and also from Austin, grew up watching 60 Minutes with his parents and he says he enjoys that in depth format. If he hears about a news maker who peaks this interest, he'll search interviews of that person on YouTube and binge watch them. Many of the millennials I interviewed also listened to longer format and PR shows and podcasts. So the takeaway here is they need to be interested in order to consume the long form and they'll seek out what they're interested in on their own time. The third and last myth that I'll talk about today is they won't pay for anything. So while many of them describe themselves as frugal and scrimp on saving things, there are things that they are willing to pay for. Man, for example, buys cheap gas station food but will spend $9.99 a month on Spotify premium. So I think this last insight is really interesting as we think about payment for content. It's not that this group is not willing to pay for anything, it's just that they have a very high bar. What they pay for has to have significant value for them personally or socially. I'll end on that note and look forward to talking more during Q&A. Thank you. That's not me, but that could be. My name is Jared Keller. I'm the director of programming at Mike. We were recently policy Mike until last week. We rebranded to give ourselves a brand new website. That's our new logo. It's much better than our old one. The whole idea was that we wanted a better design sensibility. We wanted to expand our coverage so including policy in the name didn't make much sense. Despite the rebrand and our redesign, our sensibility is still the same. We want to deliver news and analysis to the next generation of news consumer. We want to deliver stories that matter to the next generation. Now, what does that next generation mean? Oh, boy, it's millennials. Yes, it is. So these are all stats from the Pew Research Center about what kind of defines millennial generation. Most of the fundamental research says the same thing. That we're disenfranchised with existing institutions. Social security is a big one since none of us will collect any. That we're politically and socially active. That we have a strong sense of justice. This is all kind of research and every news organization should know this backwards and forwards. However, most news organizations, at least according to our op-ed pages, say that we are terrible, terrible human beings. We are idle trophy kids entitled lazy superficial, unable to commit, unable to really do anything of substance. We don't care about serious news or serious issues. We care about nothing. Unless it's going viral or a friend shared on Facebook, which is hopelessly and aggravatingly reductive. So most media outlets see this. Look at these guys. They're all smiling. They have so many aspirations and ideals. They're not going to work hard to achieve any of them. No. Do we want them to care about what's going on in Egypt? Let's frame it in terms of 27 GIFs from Jurassic Park because that's the only way to get them interested. In fact, you know, I'm blind here. I'm just going to take a quick selfie if you don't mind. Great. Here's what millennials actually look like. Hi. So I don't like hearing any of this stuff because I consume regular news. I care about what's happening in the Middle East. I care about what's happening in Ukraine. I care about what's happening to the healthcare system in the U.S. because it directly affects me. This is the face that I get people when they say you don't care because you're a millennial. This is my are you fucking kidding me face. You know, it's funny. The Pew Research Center has all this information. There's plenty of data about what millennials actually consume. But time after time, a lot of legacy media outlets will run these op-eds about how we are kind of the worst generation ever and that we will accomplish nothing. We want everything handed to us on our plate. And that's not accurate. And that's sort of what we're trying to debunk at Mike. The belief that young people don't care about serious issues. We want to build a business that involves delivering serious news and topics that matter to young people. Now, a lot of that has to do with the way in which we consume. So I have a bunch of charts, which I also stole from Pew, which I'm going to run through. So more and more people are getting their news from social networks. I think we all understand this, that more people are turning to Facebook and Twitter. And I guess Reddit, although I don't know why, for more and more news. We're consuming news in a social context. It's not just us saying at home and consuming in a one-to-one relationship with our newspaper or television, but we're consuming news in a conversation, in an ongoing conversation with our friends, with our colleagues, with our connections. Young Americans consume more and more news online. Golly gee, I wonder why. It's because we all grew up with the Internet. I don't really remember life before the Internet at all, which is terrifying and also accurate. More young people consume news on social media. This number is increasing from hour after hour, day after day, week after week, and so on. This is not just the future of young people, the future of millennials, which is generally used to describe a small, basically an age, but it's more of a sensibility, a way of consuming news. That, yeah, is confined to a certain age, but isn't really about age. My father, who was a correspondent for CBS in the Boston area, gets a lot of his news through Twitter, and he likes to joke that he's a millennial, because he consumes news in the same way that people of my generation do, and it's made him a better reporter. Although, don't tell him I said that. More people consuming news on mobile. This goes directly with the idea of consuming on social. The vast majority of traffic to Facebook and Twitter come from mobile sites, not from a desktop. So those two go hand in hand. Here's what young people are not reading. 73% don't read BuzzFeed, 84% don't read Reddit, 96% don't read Mashable or Gawker. A lot of this has to do with reading from the homepage, so a lot of times people will say, oh, I don't go to these websites, but I actually, I'll click on something that a friend shared. So why should I care? I think a lot of media companies have the idea that in order to deliver information to a younger generation, it has to be framed in the most insipid, idiotic way possible. Like, you know, I'll give you an example. You know, the crisis in Egypt explained through 27 GIFs from Jurassic Park. That is an actual article that was written on a website. I'll let you guess who wrote it. It's the idea that we don't like to eat our vegetables. We only like to eat sugar, and because there's so much sugar on the internet, we'll seek it out anywhere. So we really have to trick people. We have to bring them in and, you know, to read this kind of dreck, and then we'll give them something else. But that's not really the case at all. Our value proposition at Mike has always been that we can deliver news in a way that makes sense to young people. And the idea is that, like I said, we consume news in a social context. So, I mean, who read, did anyone read the presentation of self in Everyday Life by Gothman in college? No, I see one hand back there, too. A couple. Right. So, you know, every action that we take is designed to present a certain portrait of ourselves. Based on the news we consume, you know, the clothes that we wear, the things that we say to people. And social media has basically made that part of our everyday life. It's not a tool that we use. It's an extension of ourselves. So we think to ourselves, how do we get people to consume this news? We have to make it a part of their identity. We have to make people click and share on something because it resonates with their identity, because it's valuable to them as a person who lives their life not offline and then with a little bit online, but who lives their life in two different mediums. So I'm going to run through some examples of hard news stories that we did that actually played really well. Oh, well, here's our traffic growth, too. We found that young people actually care about serious issues, surprisingly. There's not a GIF in any... Well, there are GIFs around here somewhere. But, you know, we have focused primarily on policy, focused on healthcare. We focused on legislation in Congress. We focused on the crises abroad in Egypt, in Ukraine, in Russia. And boy, like, the traffic numbers don't lie. People are actually interested. And this isn't just kind of like a beaten switch, where we have one, you know, super viral story with, like, the 15 cats are having a better day than you, and that generates the 18 million uniques. No, this is all spread pretty evenly over all of our stories. So Obama just did what no other president before him has done. I forget what story this actually was. I think it was about capping CO2 emissions. 137,000 shares, 2.5 million uniques. I'm not really sure that the New York Times could say the same, with all due respect to the Times. One study shows the shocking result when women and minorities emailed their professors talking about gender and race issues on campus. 38,000 shares, 1 million views. Social problems is more of an embarrassment for America than it is for Russia. This is a little media criticism for us. A 7,000 shares, 2 million views. This isn't, like, fluffy stuff. This isn't, like, 23 things that only people who studied radical feminist ecosystems advance or will understand. We're seeing very, very narrow identities for a cheap share. We're focusing on issues that actually matter to young people. Issues of justice, international affairs, politics, culture, society, social and economic justice. And it's working for us somehow. So what this means for media companies. Next generation news consumers care about serious news. Vital and viral, not mutually exclusive. I've always told people that if something is good, they will share it. A good example is who's read Massey Coates' cover story for the Atlantic on the case reparations. Yeah, that's like some serious hefty shit and it's the most read story in the Atlantic history. You know, oh god, what's another good example. Ann Marie Slaughter on why women can't have it all. Also a really, really serious issue. It touched off a major debate about gender relations in the U.S. Incredibly, incredibly long. But people still read it and enjoyed it. A lot of my friends were my age. And I don't know why that matters. You know, read and enjoyed it as well. Millennials, they're just like you and me. They're just like, well, they're just like me because I am a millennial. But I think the last thing that I'll say about this is that no young person likes to be identified as a millennial, no one likes to be spoken to as a millennial. It is the most condescending thing you can say to someone. It basically says, I'm going to put you in a box so that I can exploit your culture and sell you stuff. Just call me young people. Or just say people, even. But the next generation of news consumption has everything to do with identity, has everything to do with issues that matter. And the more and more media companies continue to put millennials in a box and say we can only speak to you in terms of funny cat pictures, the more we're going to see the two-tiered system of content that we see online. We see a bunch of news startups which generate all sorts of funny pictures and stuff and get all the funding and then we see organizations which are doing great enterprise reporting, languishing. And those two things aren't mutually exclusive. You can cover important issues in a way that's accessible and meaningful to young people. You just have to treat them like people and not like young people. And I think that's it. Okay, thanks. I think I can figure that out. Hey, everybody. I think you might have figured out already that the theme of this panel is none of us wanted to be on this panel. That works out all right in the end anyway. But, oh, I actually, I think I mean it well. It turns out that millennial as Jared's so well teed up is not really I think anybody wants to get called if it's going to look like this. So, I'll start with the defense of, I swear I'm too old for this shit. But, but, hopefully I'll manage to say something worthwhile. I was trying to think about what would mark me as a millennial or as a person of the internet, so to speak. And the first thing I thought of was about my parents, right? You start with who you can contrast yourself to. In about 1989, they bought our family's first encyclopedia Britannica and an IBM 386 in about the same year. I don't think they ever expected the former to obviate, the latter to obviate the need for the former. I, on the other hand, grew up in a way where the Google Wikipedia symbiosis is totally natural to me. I take it for granted that I have an external memory sitting at my fingertips 24-7. My first encyclopedia came with a game. And the fact that it was on a CD-ROM as opposed to the web doesn't really matter much in retrospect. So, I'm up here because I run a website called TurboVote. My co-founder, Seth Flaxman, is in internet terms a little bit younger than me. His first real promise that he got bought into on technology was Amazon's. It is, technology brings you stuff to your door in the mail. And so one day, when we were both graduate students, he came and asked me the question of why hasn't the internet made democracy awesome? And I thought, well, the answer to that question would be that there must be like a database of election rules, election information. It's an information problem. You just collect it and you publish it. That must already exist, right? It didn't. I thought, well, it's the internet. It must be really easy to just collect it and publish it, right? Actually, it still wasn't, but I'm going to maintain that that was a fair assumption, especially for me as sort of a child of Google. Instead, what he meant, though, was that we would collect it, publish it, but also use it to send people stuff in the mail. And it actually took a lot of work to find a publishing house capable of taking all of the different forms and all of the really unique copies of things that every state requires to get registered to vote and to submit an absentee ballot request, but we learned to do it and we send out voter registration forms and absentee ballot requests in the mail with stamped addressed envelopes. I'm pretty proud of it. But the other day, speaking of the promises of the internet that take you by surprise that Mark-Q is old and no longer on the edge of it, a talk went viral in my Twitter feed in which one of the core complaints about big data, in addition to, you know, all of the invasiveness, all of the unforgiveness of it, is, if you know so much about me, why can't you talk to me? Why do you insist on showing me both GEICO car insurance ads and Zipcar ads if you know that at least one of them can't be relevant to my needs? I was a little shocked by that. The idea that you could demand that of internet advertising. But this guy who, technically speaking, is older than me, is, I think, once I started looking around on point. I looked at Matthew Norfleet, who in 2012 was a student body president in Eastern Michigan University. He was implementing TurboVote on campus trying to register his classmates to vote. He looked at all of our guidelines on sending mass emails across an entire campus and institutionalizing it into standard administrative processes and said, that's boring. That's not very personal. And he recruited a set of student leaders, installed our mobile website a shortcut on everyone's home screens and sent them out to stalk down and register their classmates one by one. Hi, I'm Matt. Can I register you to vote? We hired him for the record. Angelica Smith was the student body vice president at Virginia Tech University last year. Again, she looked at all of our guidelines about doing mass broadcasts about the importance of voter engagement and said, huh, I bet I can top that. And she brought together a coalition of student groups and relationships so that every student heard a custom message about the importance of voting from someone relevant to them. And as I started hearing these stories I kept thinking about that talk that had popped through my Twitter feed and I started thinking about what we've been doing. And actually over the course of the last couple years we've been doing that already. Our partners at Towson University took it to something of an extreme frustration, golf cart. I don't know if they actually hunt down and stalk individual students with it or not. I kind of hope they don't. But what I thought of as our growing ability to collect more information and sort more data keep thinking in encyclopedic terms in many ways has meant that we're able to track additional regulations. And as we're trying to explain to people the importance of things like which places you can register to vote turns out we've had to design rules for well how do you know who should know about that? Answer. We track who's sent in their voter registration forms. We know who needs to be told about registering an election day because they didn't get registered in time. We can make that more personal for an individual user and the number of ways in which we talk to individual voters using the platform that is to vote has grown exponentially more complex and as such infinitely more personal over the last two and a half years of our operations. It just took sitting down and talking to those users to realize that that's what we've really been responding to overall this time. And so I set out to build the all knowing all seeing voter engagement machine and it turns out what I've been building is an experience that lets each and every voter be at the center of their own actions casting their own ballots speaking their own voice in the most unique and personal way that they know how and if there's anything that I'm seeing coming out of my own experience serving anyone of what I'd call the next generation the internet that's the promise we're busy trying to fulfill and trying to make come real that I hope we'll all be able to take for granted next. Thanks. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. First thing so we have this panel talking about millennials and young people and there's actually a really young person here who would probably be the best to talk about this than any of us sorry I know you guys did great but yeah so everyone now has to follow Andrew Curio he's new to Twitter he's super dope he's from Florida so you guys should all follow him right now seriously and like normally with young people I would say pull out your phones but I see everybody's on laptop so do it on your laptop but yeah he's super cool alright so my name is Chris I work at mikva challenge mikva is a oh wrong way organization excuse me in Chicago so we work with young people to get them involved in the political process the my executive director says that when you want to get young people to be professional ball players you make them practice practice practice and then they get good right but in America for civics or for voting we tell them you can't be involved until hit 18 and then we expect them to be great at it and it just doesn't work that way so our organization focuses on getting them involved a lot younger so then this question about a stronger internet and so the question that came to me was for what why do we need that and so for me it's for the young people I work with to be able to change the world that they live in the world that we all live in but that's that's the goal that we have to change this thing to something better and so when we talk about this question of young folks it's normally by old folks who don't understand young folks so and they don't understand the way they do things and they think the way the young people do things is wrong because it's not the way that they did it back in the day and so this is a bunch of adults at a table and young people have to look and that's not the way it looks anymore so now young people are at the table and they use their computers, they use their phones and they create dope stuff it's crazy I wrote all this stuff down but no I'm not using it and they create all these great products for them, for their peers they're super engaged the young people I work with focus on juvenile justice issues in Chicago and in Cook County and so we policy mic we were using that we use rap genius to annotate juvenile justice policies in Illinois and they were super excited because they got to put their own flavor on boring stuff right and so what we do I guess they term it participatory politics we want to get young people engaged in the political process wherever they are at and that is what they're doing it's not like we invented something for them they did it so you can be civically engaged without necessarily going to the polls you don't necessarily have to vote every four years and if you are great but if that's the only thing you're doing these young folks are engaging every day as he said they're sharing information they're liking things they're engaging with information with editors they're doing all this stuff that before they didn't have an opportunity to so we talk about again these the older folks they want to have it their way but the young people are not doing it so people are getting upset right and so young people are still consuming information they're still probably more than any generation prior to them and now they're able to create information at a level unseen they get a smart phone they get an iPod, they get whatever they want not whatever they want, whatever they have and they make stuff and they're able to share it and they're able to engage each other in a way that we weren't able to do before but so it starts with a question the main way you engage young people is you talk to them you ask them questions and it's not about engaging them where you want to engage them but you learn to engage them where they're at and then they'll go forward so our question was what tools, policies and practices do you need to positively transition from Corrections to Community I know that's long, that was adult created but it basically means what do young people need when they get out of the juvenile justice system in Chicago so one of the answers that my young folks came up with was Expungio and so this is a web app to help young people erase their criminal records we found out that 25,000 young people were arrested in Chicago every year and in 2012 70 young people filed for expungement and were able they were granted expungement but that's a very very small drop in the bucket right so my young people said this is a huge problem and we got to do something about it so this is what we came up against they presented this information to community leaders, to civic leaders and most of these folks are a little bit older I felt like this is going to be a very ageist conversation so I'm sorry about that but they had no clue what they were talking about it didn't make sense to them they knew it was an issue but they didn't understand how an app or a web app or what was a web app like what is that, how is it two things at once and how that could change this problem so we spent most of the fall of 2013 trying to get people interested in this issue they were talking to their friends they were on Facebook steadily tweeting out stuff on Twitter they did all this stuff to try to get people bring awareness to this issue so the internet is actually where we found our solution so a non-profit is very hard none of us know tech stuff like I'm not a tech person at all I appreciate it and I love what you guys do but I don't know how to do it so one day I met Kathy Dang at Hackathon and she tweeted at me about something around juvenile justice issues and I said oh my students came with this idea bam so she was like cool I'd love to work on it so within four months we created the app and we released it in January of this year like very basic but people started paying attention and now they were starting to say oh young people can do stuff they're not just you know especially with Chicago they're just not killers they're not they're not lazy they do care and it was it was an experience so the other thing was a lot of we live in America it's a very racist country it's very segregated and a lot of our young people are very disenfranchised Chicago we don't expect this from young folks especially young black and brown people but through participatory politics through this internet they're able to engage with each other they're able to engage with civic leaders so like my students tweet at people all the time normally not the higher ups because they don't control their own twitter but like the staffers the number twos and so you know they a group of young people who normally don't have access in the political arena now have access so this other thing about like organizing I was listening to an NPR piece a week ago and they were talking about you know this is the 50th anniversary of freedom summer and so you had this whole movement to talk about civil rights and equity and there's this whole process this is an organizing process and these young people are doing that they're just not doing the traditional way so they're still you know they're creating awareness campaigns through likes through shares on facebook it's not the same as going out past not flyers they're not doing that anymore but they're still interested and so I was saying like in the 60s it takes weeks to get 100 some signatures maybe a few thousand but in 3 days 75,000 people sign the petition against Bank of America it's just it's unseen right and now young people are using the internet to mobilize and teach their peers it said 45% of youth get their news from friends or family it's like 49% are using traditional media like newspapers but this is you know this is the way that they're going they don't talk to Andrew and see expert in the room these young folks are way more earth conscious than we are and so the young people I work with hate using paper like they just can't stand it so they'd rather do stuff online because they know what this has in regards for their future right so we released the app in January there was all this buzz juvenile expungement became a hot topic in Chicago and so the mayor had to start acknowledging it so he cosponsored a bill for automatic juvenile expungement in March and they just passed the bill so this is a very quick turnaround of young people engaged in an issue they fought for it they shared it with their peers and now we have policy change that's going to effect thousands and thousands of young people in the future so then why do we want a better internet or how do we ensure that we have a better internet and so I think to do that we have to make sure people from diverse backgrounds are creating what the internet is not just what is shared on it and I think a better internet means a possibility for a better world social media is part of a broader democratizing project that empowers communities and individuals in ways traditional media cannot young people can now organize themselves in society faster than any other generation they learn about more issues and with that knowledge organize powerful civic actions they topple governments in the Middle East without drones they briefly terrorize Wall Street each action they learn and share after each action they learn and share those lessons with the world and we all become smarter the other thing is that young people still need guidance and they crave it they're very talented and they're very witty and they can do so much but they're still young and there's lots to learn and we still have lots to learn on them so to ensure a better internet we have to teach them digital literacy news literacy how to critically analyze what the world is so that they can lay the foundation or push it forward to have a better world and a better internet so that's it we have a couple of minutes for questions so I'm going to invite everybody up Ethan is going to kindly run the microphone we have a bunch of time to ask for concisely worded questions and we'll ask our speakers for concisely worded answers let's go to... oh sorry Ethan sees the question I hear you that you don't like the stereotypes and nobody likes to be stereotyped but you're all ducking but I took in advance to be the point of the what we were trying to divine here which are what are the real trends put aside the stereotypes that conjure something and it's not just the emergence of new technology it's not just television young people in the 60s conjure something and again it's not just color television or space travel young people of the 80s so what are the defining trends that you do see and just a couple of suggestions are defining events the current president's election was that a defining event and the recession a defining event but what are the trends that you actually do see with this generation so how about it let's go down the line if I have to kick off oh boy so I work in civic technology civically we're actually seeing you voter engagement go up so clearly there's a real willingness to engage in political channels again but with a real sense that people want to interact in ways that are relevant and I think there's a sort of a jadedness about channels that don't serve us well and when I talk about the demand of technology and big data and ads this could work better I think with politics there's that same sense of I'm going to get engaged but I want this to work better and there's a real demandingness of the institutions around us and a real sense that they aren't working well and that we don't see the channels necessarily to automatically improve them so there's a real willingness to engage combined with a real fear of being let down so I would say that I think one of the big differences is just how much information is out there today for young people and so if I can make one broad generalization it would be that this group is very very savvy in terms of being able to sift through that information and figure out what it is that they want to engage with I think they're incredibly resourceful in that way and so that's what I meant when I said that they're not passive consumers they know what they want they know how to get it and then they also know how to cross check it with other sources to figure out if they want to figure out whether it's accurate or not and they might not always do that a piece of news might not always be important enough for them to do that but in the times that it is they know how to do that I think there's probably a bigger emphasis on identity formation with this generation and there's been maybe during any other time in American history with the exception of Revolutionary War which is all about identity formation I guess and also the 60s and 70s but there are more tools at our disposal and I've generated these identities in the past your sort of self is defined by your associations I'm a member of this I go to this bowling club or I work in this job or I associate with these people now because the boundaries of association are cut down by the internet and by social media every action is an act by identity formation so even the act of consuming news has become what does this say about me people will share things often people will share things on their Facebook or Twitter pages that they haven't even read because it says something smart about them it says I'm the sort of person who reads Harper's even though I didn't actually read anything in Harper's ever and because of this everything is couched identity so in order to get important issues important topics in the news laws, legislation, Congress wars abroad the question is always how does this affect me and what does this mean for my future as a human being not just as a member of a group as an American or as a young person but for me personally what does this mean for my route to self self-actualization and I think that often gets taken as a sign of narcissism because we talk about go find a job that makes you happy which a lot of people tell their kids when they graduate college and it's totally unrealistic speaking of someone who has had jobs that have made me not happy but you know I mean there's because there are so many more avenues than taking a job or becoming a member of a friars club or something that allow you to construct your identity and associate with different people I think there's more of an emphasis put on it on day-to-day activity I'd say one thing this when you term a group of people the divide is so big so like if you're saying millennials you're talking about like 15 to 20 something that's a very different group of people to say what do they want to do they're not unified in that aspect the other thing is Trump it's about interest and you know it's hard to say what each one is interested in they're all interested in different stuff but that is what they will share that is what they will read that is what they will do stuff that interests them and I would disagree that it's always about identity with that demographic with teenagers it's all about figuring out who they are that is the point in their life when they do that they're trying to figure out who they are and their friends have so much to do with that it's no longer adults it's their peer group so I think one way that we engage young people better particularly with news is that you have more young people writing what we consider news I think a lot of it's going to have to be a change in the definition of what news is and the people who traditionally got to define that can no longer do it and we have to accept that let's go to the next question hi, sorry, Emmy Calabale Stanford D. School I'm wondering to what extent does the terminology and the conversation around millennials need to change I really enjoyed your point on we don't want to be on this panel you know it's sort of like that really brings up I think a fundamental point what do we need to use I saw on Twitter we're young money we're not millennials what are we what other words do we need to use I'll just say real quick that millennials is not really an actual phrase I mean it's a marketing term Teenager was invented in the 50s Teenagers didn't exist before the 1950s which is ludicrous to think about young people if you really have to into the question that it's now being defined generationally rather than the way people consume so I mean the way we talk about it internally at our company is we don't say like millennials we want to get those millennials because none of us identifies millennials even though I put myself up there it's more of a question of what is the next generation of news consumer and that's going to be everyone from someone who's just entering high school to my grandmother who's amazing on Twitter any other quick suggestions I think Chris made a really good point in terms of you know this is a really broad group of people you're talking about you're talking about like 15 plus years that separate the youngest to the oldest and so I would think about more looking at their life stages and even beyond the life stages segmenting them you know based on their interests or psychographic information it's really tricky when you're trying to do like broad strokes generalizations of a group of people who are you know 15 years apart especially in that part of their lives where things are changing so quickly great well I think we're out of time let's get a round of applause for all of our great speakers here thank you also for the questions