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Another Thing Millennials Do Differently

by Rachel Burke

Millennials are getting their news in unprecedented ways. With all the new social media apps and smartphones, millennials have faster access to the news than ever before, all at the touch of a screen. There’s a misconception that millennials don’t read the news anymore because of decline in print newspapers. But this isn’t the case. They haven’t stopped paying attention to the news; they just found new ways to access it.

According to the American Press Institute, 85 percent of millennials say keeping up with the news is important to them, and 69 percent of them get news daily. The purpose of this institution is to advance the news industry by “helping publishers understand and engage audiences,” according to their website. There are smartphone apps for nearly every mainstream media outlet including The Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, The Wall Street Journal and many more. Not only are news outlets distributing the news through their apps, social media apps now facilitate news.

There are pros and cons to this new system millennials have for getting their current event information. News sources from social media might not always be reliable, and if they are reliable, they are almost always biased. Most news sources in every outlet are biased in one way or another, but they also have fact-checking and editing for their articles. Political science professor Dr. Laura Wiedlocher likes to balance her sources to distinguish biases. She said, “I usually look at some breaking news on CNN and then look for the same story on Fox to see how they cover it or if they cover it at all.”

Sophomore justice administration major Henry Muhlena gets a lot of his news from YouTube. He uses official channels from news networks like CNN, MSNBC and National Public Radio. “The Majority Report is my favorite,” Muhlena said about the left-leaning daily political talk show. When he watches the news, he generally looks at national and international politics. Muhlena believes news is important to this generation because politics affect taxes, students loans and health insurance.

Young people should be watching, listening or reading the news according to both Muhlena and Wiedlocher. “Young people have been the voices of change,” Wiedlocher emphasized, referencing the bus boycotts that were started by young people from the civil rights movement in the 1960s and the Vietnam protests from the 1970s. “These things happen on college campuses with young people fired up and motivated.”

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