How Students Engage with News: Five Takeaways for Educators, Journalists, and Librarians. The News Study Executive Summary

This executive summary provides a snapshot of the larger report, "How Students Engage with News: Five Takeaways for Educators, Journalists, and Librarians" (ED591128). The report represents perhaps the largest and most comprehensive research effort exploring how U.S. college-age students are accessing, consuming, and engaging with news in the digital era. It seeks to understand how students see the role of news in their lives, in their learning and social communities, and in a democracy at a time when personal beliefs may carry more weight than objective facts, information platforms fuel endless debates, and the authority of traditional media is falling away. Findings are drawn from an online survey administered at a diverse mix of 11 colleges and universities from across the country, yielding a sample of 5,844 students. Follow-up interviews with 37 survey respondents complemented the survey. A computational analysis of Twitter data from survey respondents (N = 731) and a larger Twitter panel of more than 135,000 college-age persons provided observational and external comparative data to help frame the survey results. The findings suggest young adults believe news is valuable to their lives and to society on the whole, and many see themselves as active participants in its dissemination. Yet, the new digital environment and current political reality has made successful navigation extremely difficult. Educational and media institutions need to do far more to help this emerging generation succeed in operating in this confusing, overwhelming, and often misleading online environment. Ultimately, they must educate young adults to understand how to find and engage with credible information and give them the knowledge necessary to fulfill both their personal needs and civic roles. This summary concludes with the five research takeaways presented in the larger report.