A massive nationwide experiment in French high schools proves that free newspaper subscriptions and teacher training significantly improve youth media literacy and civic knowledge.
Everybody likes to complain that young people do not read news anymore. They sit on TikTok, watch short videos, and absorb random nonsense from the internet. Can you really blame them? Quality journalism is locked behind paywalls, and social media is free. So teenagers naturally choose what is easy and cheap.
But does this mean they are completely lost to misinformation?
Researchers Simon Briole, Julia Cagé, and Andrea Prat decided to test this in a massive French experiment involving over nine thousand high-school students. The results has just been published: Making Teenagers Read Newspapers. A Nationwide Experiment in French High Schools.
The researchers wanted to see what happens if you remove financial and cognitive barriers. So, they gave some classes free subscriptions to Le Monde, provided media education training to teachers, or combined both approaches.
The results were surprising, at least for cynics. Over 70% of students actually activated their free digital subscriptions. Even better, they kept reading months later, using the app on their phones in the evenings and on weekends. The intervention significantly boosted news consumption and improved media literacy skills across the board.
What is most interesting is what happened in disadvantaged schools. For students from poorer backgrounds, access to quality news increased their knowledge of current affairs dramatically, cutting the initial information gap by 45 to 70 percent. It turns out that when you give people tools instead of just lecturing them, they actually use them.
Even almost a year after the free trial ended, students who received both free access and classroom guidance were eight percentage points more likely to pay for a subscription themselves. That shows genuine habit formation. Who would think that teenagers can build lasting reading habits if we stop assuming they only care about silly online trends?
So maybe the youth are not broken after all. Maybe our approach to delivering news was simply wrong. If we make quality journalism accessible and show young people how to navigate it, they choose truth over fake news. That gives a bit of realistic hope for the future of democracy, no?
Making Teenagers Read Newspapers – Abstract
Despite unprecedented access to information in the digital age, young citizens face growing challenges related to news consumption and misinformation. This large-scale randomized controlled trial examines the impact of two complementary interventions designed to foster media literacy and the consumption of high-quality news among high-school students, implemented in France over the 2024-25 academic year. The study involves 243 high schools (for a total number of 9, 628 students), randomly assigned to a control group or to receive one or both of the following interventions: (i) a one-year free digital subscription to the leading national newspaper, and (ii) media education modules implemented by teachers. Exploiting unique data on students’ actual online news consumption, we document a very large uptake of the free subscription, which translates into persistent and large increases in news consumption (+0.49 to 0.60 sd) and demand for future news, including an 8pp increase in paid subscriptions nearly a year after the intervention. We also observe a 0.20 to 0.31 sd increase in news knowledge for students enrolled in deprived schools, reducing baseline information inequality by 45-70%. Finally, we show that both free news access and media education improve media literacy skills (+0.08 to 0.26 sd), with larger effects among students taught by teachers with prior experience in media education.
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