Just 30 years ago, the majority of households in the U.S. paid for newspapers, and roughly a third of teens were reading them daily. Now, the majority of us get our news from social media platforms, and only about 12% of teens follow the news regularly.
It might seem like an unimportant difference. I suppose it makes sense that in the digital age we’ve moved away from print news forms and to digital platforms.
But it’s not just that.
With this shift we’ve moved to short-form content – even the biggest newsrooms now create Instagram reels and TikToks to cater to the younger audience’s increasingly short attention spans.
Reliable publications utilize social media. But so do a lot of random parties. In my experience, news on social media is littered with misinformation, sensationalization and half-truths.
I’m part of the problem when it comes to consuming news on social media, unfortunately. I’m sorry to say I remember first hearing about cyclospora, the infamous “lettuce parasite”, not through a Wall Street Journal article or by word of mouth, but an Instagram reel joking about how pizza had never given anyone a parasite.
I didn’t think much of the reel, and it was many days later before I realized cyclospora was a serious matter and thought to look into it for myself. That got me thinking – I run my school paper, my school’s writing club and have been writing pieces for the Pleasanton Weekly since January … if I’m not motivated to research important news occurrences as they happen, what are the chances any of my peers are?
Not only has the rise of social media shortened our attention spans, it’s also enforced what I call the passive approach to news: We never seek it out; we just wait for it to find us as we’re scrolling through our feeds.
In fact, even when given the explicit opportunity, I’ve found that many of my classmates prefer not to keep up with local news – it’s extremely perplexing to me how many Amador students I see turning down a copy of the Amadon newspaper when we’re handing it out at lunch every month.
I’d like to believe that my generation’s desire to stay connected and informed with our community hasn’t changed since previous generations. Rather, I think social media has redefined what teens think being connected and informed means.
Our algorithmic feeds often create the illusion of connection – we’re exposed to content that’s designed to keep us on the platform, and that’s accomplished by showing us the things we want to see.
This brings me to a psychology term I learned: confirmation bias. If people are already exposed to what they want to see, they’re not particularly inclined to seek out ideas that don’t match their existing views. That causes polarization, another big issue facing journalists today.
How can teens combat this? My theory is that it’s best to push through the inertia and start shifting back to active news consumption. That means replacing social media with newspapers, even if only once in a while.
This is a small but incredibly important difference: Instead of just waiting for news to appear on our feeds between memes and vacation photos, we should be actively seeking it out.
Teens 30 years ago were probably reading more newspapers because it was just part of their routine, not because they cared more. We should make reading credible news part of our routines again.
Free, credible news is all around us, and we should take advantage of it. Democracy relies on us knowing the news beyond our algorithms, and that goes for both teens and adults.
So the next time you pass by one of the Pleasanton Weekly’s free distribution boxes downtown, consider picking one up. It might just be the difference between being an active community participant versus just another passive scroller.
Editor’s note: Riya Upadhyaya is a 2026 summer intern for the Pleasanton Weekly, Livermore Vine and DanvilleSanRamon.com. A rising senior at Amador Valley High School, Upadhyaya is an incoming editor-in-chief for the Amadon newspaper and serves as president of the Amador Writers Ensemble.
