A ray of hope appeared in my inbox, shining through all the bleak material about declining news readership and resulting civic harm.
It came from Europe, where a group of researchers found a way to get high school students to develop the habit of reading newspapers.
They conducted an experiment in France, involving students at 243 high schools during the 2024-2025 school year.
Their hypothesis was that the newspaper habit could be built by providing access, via free subscriptions, in combination with media literacy education.
It turned out that “access works also on its own,” said Andrea Prat, a Columbia University economics professor who co-authored the study.
“You just get the online subscription, basically, and it works, at least for some people,” he said in a phone interview.
Among the 2,494 students given free subscriptions to Le Monde, France’s leading national newspaper, 70% activated them. Within that group, 98.6% read multiple articles and 63.8% went to Le Monde’s website 50 times or more, even on evenings and weekends.
“This result stands in contrast to the widespread perception, documented for example in the Reuters Digital News Report, that younger generations feel disconnected from traditional newspapers,” the authors wrote.
Their experiment showed that when offered a “highbrow” newspaper, “students engaged with it at remarkably high rates.”
The experiment was done by Prat, Simon Briole at the University of Montpellier and Julia Cagé at Sciences Po Paris. Results were presented at a June conference in Rome and their report, “Making Teenagers Read Newspapers: A Nationwide Experiment in French High Schools,” was shared online July 7.
Further studies are needed, especially in the U.S., but it’s exciting nevertheless.
Newspapers are perpetually searching for ways to reach young readers. Current efforts include posting more short videos and emulating social media influencers.
This can seem Sisyphean, especially now that fewer people of all ages read news or any written material, attention spans are eroding and AI is pushing the world away from original sources of information. But the battle must be fought because the future of both democracy and the news industry are at stake.
In the experiment, one group of students was provided a yearlong digital subscription to Le Monde, paid with grant funding. Another group received subscriptions and instruction from teachers given media instruction modules.
A third group experienced only instruction from teachers using the modules, and a fourth control group received no intervention.
Providing subscriptions had the greatest effect.
Exposure to a quality newspaper not only increased media literacy and news knowledge, it developed the habit of reading newspapers and seeking multiple sources of news.
All three interventions increased students’ interest in getting news from different sources, and those given subscriptions showed more trust in newspapers.
Those students more often cited a newspaper as their main source of information. They also spent more time reading newspapers than the control group or those who just received media literacy education.
Their activity undermined stereotypes of what appeals to younger readers. Instead of entertainment or sports, students were most likely to read international news stories, for instance.
Especially promising, to me, were the lasting effects of exposure to newspapers.
Months after the experiment ended, 20% of the students who had read Le Monde returned to its website.
In surveys after the experiment, students given both subscriptions and media education were 66% more likely to say they’ll subscribe to Le Monde in the future.
In the researchers’ words, “news consumption patterns persist in the long run, pointing to the formation of lasting news consumption habits.”
Prat said the experiment is now being replicated in Brazil and he hopes to conduct a similar one in a large U.S. school district, ideally tracking the students for years to see how their news habits evolve.
He believes the experiment makes the case for public policies supporting these interventions, such as covering the cost of digital newspaper subscriptions for students.
The cost would be minimal compared to what’s already spent on digital curriculum, especially if publishers offered deep discounts on bulk subscriptions for students.
Media literacy teaching is fairly common. The News Literacy Project, a nonprofit providing materials to students in 6,000 U.S. school districts, reached 890,000 students last year.
Regionally, the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public has reached more than 70,000 students since it began “MisInfo Day” events and educator training in 2019.
The France experiment suggests these programs could do more to build lasting, healthy news habits in students if they were paired with a newspaper subscription, not just curated samples of news coverage.
Prat said media literacy programs are “super important and there’s a lot of great work being done here.” But they don’t “actually encourage people to engage with news more because it makes them more skeptical in general,” he said.
“Another equally important part of the story is that a large share of the U.S. population does not engage with the news,” he said. “It’s related because if you don’t engage with the news, you are more vulnerable to fake news.”
Newspapers used to provide free or discounted copies and educational material to schools through a nationwide program called Newspapers in Education, or NIE, but it was curtailed as the industry lost revenue and cut costs.
Some newspapers still offer NIE or student access in other ways. One of my favorite approaches is the one-year gift subscription that the Minnesota Star Tribune has given to graduating high schoolers since 2023.
Another is the guerrilla effort by Seattle philanthropist Kim Gould, who provided Garfield High School‘s library with free newspapers and supported a student-led news literacy contest.
The timing may be right to restore and reimagine NIE, especially in light of this research.
Lynne Lance, executive director of the National Newspaper Association Foundation, told me via email that NIE is coincidentally on her board’s agenda next month. She would like to see the foundation take the lead on reviving the program nationally.
I suggest newspaper organizations and publishers work with media literacy programs, educators and policymakers to provide gift subscriptions to general interest newspapers. Start with an experiment like the one in France.
The goal should be more than just media literacy.
To build healthy, lasting news habits, students should be given a chance to fully experience newspapers. Print or digital, they are the primary source of most local journalism and key to civic knowledge and engagement.
I’m not saying this to promote The Seattle Times. We’re doing relatively well.
My concern is for the rest of the country and what will happen if future generations don’t value or understand what newspapers do and why they’re important.
Perhaps the key is just getting quality newspapers into the hands of more students and letting their curiosity work its magic.
