Gen-Z Doesn’t Watch the News

Shortly after turning thirty, I pulled my hamstring playing slow-pitch softball.

That was the first time I realized I was getting old.

The second time was also during softball, but this time it had nothing to do with my waning athleticism.

It was when I got to the game and saw all the younger kids on my team drinking a ready-made cocktail I had never seen or heard of before.

I was under the impression High Noons were the cool thing to drink, so I felt very out of the loop.

"What are those?", I asked.

They looked at me like I was grandpa asking what Facebook is.

“Surfsides bro”

A few days later I was banging my head against my computer trying to think of an idea for a TikTok video.

I was about to give up and then it hit me.

“Where did Surfsides come from, and how did they get so popular, so fast?”

I made it in three hours and went to bed.

When I woke up, it was already at 100K views.

Over the next few days, it kept climbing, finally peaking at 600K.

My new social media obsession was born.

A few days later, we were heading out to Cincinnati for a tournament.

The youngest kid on the team came up to me, and said he saw my video on his TikTok Feed.

Then he told me something that blew my mind.

Even though he loves Surfsides, he would've never thought to research their origin story, because he doesn’t go on the internet and look for things to read.

He just scrolls through TikTok and watches whatever it shows him.

And he doesn't watch TV unless sports are on.

It made me realize that Gen-Z doesn’t watch the news, they don’t browse through articles online, and they definitely aren’t reading the newspaper.

They have full trust in the algorithm's ability to show them the most interesting content that's relevant to them, at that moment.

Now this was anecdotal evidence, but I saw it two more times on a much larger scale.

I made a video about proposed plans for a casino near Hofstra University, a story that was well covered by every local news outlet and also, not really news.

Legacy media had been talking about it for weeks.

But the video got over 150K views and college kids were commenting and sharing as if I broke an exclusive story.

Then last week, I made one about a free concert happening on Long Island, also covered by legacy media in the days prior.

This one got almost 700K views. Once again, lots of comments from younger kids who legitimately had no idea it was happening.

Why does any of this matter?

Because if you sell products to anyone under the age of 25, and you don’t show up in their social media feed, you might as well not exist.

And now with Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn all investing heavily in short-form video, more and more people, regardless of how old they are, will also only see what’s in their feed.

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Over the last 90 days, I've been very deep down the social media rabbit hole learning the inner workings of TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube Shorts.

Each week, I'm going to share observations from my day-to-day experiences that tie back to broader media trends I think are worth paying attention to.

If you enjoyed this article, please share it with a friend. If you didn't, please let me know. I'm trying to get better at long-form writing and would appreciate feedback.

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