Design Principles for Projects on Youth, News, and Digital Citizenship

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Ana Filipa Oliveira, whose interest is also in young people and the news. There is a sense that younger and older generations have very different relationships with the news, and this is expressed also in their divergent news consumption patterns; younger audiences tend to favour more autonomous, hands-on and creative approaches to knowledge acquisition, and are also more active media producers on their own terms. But what do they think news is, and how does this affect their news habits? How might we research this?

Examining this may need the use of complementary traditional and digital research methods, but this is not always easy. Problems here are with making research representative, inclusive, and ethical; interactive and participatory without oversimplifying the research questions; and ethical by ensuring confidentiality, consent, and well-being, and considering the impact of the research on participants.

The present project, YouNDigital (Youth, News, and Digital Citizenship) addressed this for Portugal with the use of an online questionnaire, media diaries, and semi-structured interviews. It is also building a digital newsroom. This therefore combines a design thinking process, the addressing of ethical and technical challenges, and considerations about ethical demands and affordances, by using a cyclical, human-centred, collaborative design methodology.

The project began with a set of preliminary interviews with people connected to the journalism area, to inform that design process. This also produced a set of ideal user personas that could be referred to during the further process. This fosters understanding, accessibility, competencies, and empowerment.