By Charlotte Cheek
Recently I read an article in Business Insider titled “Millennials don’t actually watch the news.” I read on and I agreed with Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix. I, a millennial, do not tune in to the newscast at 6 PM on my TV. Just because I and many other millennials do not turn on the news daily, does not mean we are not consumers of the same news stations. We reach the same media outlets in different ways.
As outlined in Tim Stenovec and Skye Gould’s article, millennials get their news from social media, digital outlets, and smartphones. At the same time, millennials are not following random medias or downloading Apps from obscure sources on their phones to get their news fix. Instead, millennials are downloading, following, watching, liking and reading from the same media outlets that other generations tune into nightly on the television.
The Greatest Generation, Baby Boomers, and Generation X may watch CNN every night, but millennials follow CNN on Twitter, like CNN on Facebook or may even have the CNN News App. Moreover, other generations may read the local newspaper or the Wall Street Journal every morning while millennials seem to skip a morning news brief. In the age of hashtags and up-to-date news, millennials reach the news throughout the day quickly and learn from top news outlets through Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram. Particularly Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat all have top media outlets on their sites and apps. Millennials wake up and check their Twitter, for example, to see what is going on in their immediate circles and in the greater world. So, do not discredit the nightly news channels, even local news channels (they have Facebook, Twitter, websites, etc. as well!), because millennials are still following them, just in a different way.
We may be even more tuned into the news, because our news is not bound by a limited amount of space in the morning newspaper or a limited amount of time on the television. We are constantly being updated to the world around us through-out the day through the same media outlets online sources.
Traditional media outlets like the nightly news on your local news station still reach millennials and millennials want to be reached. Traditional Medias use the same content from their newspapers and nightly news online. That is why traditional media still holds an important seat in your set of marketing tools. Businesses still need to get their business featured in traditional medias to continue to reach millennials and baby boomers, alike.