“Talk to Me as a Friend!”: How Teenagers Prefer Their Newsfluencers on Social Media

Abstract

This study investigates how Portuguese teenagers (aged 13–18) perceive and prefer the communication characteristics of so-called “newsfluencers” on social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Through 20 semi-structured interviews, the research explores how verbal and non-verbal traits shape adolescents’ engagement with news in a media ecosystem increasingly dominated by digital intermediaries. Drawing on literature on brand journalism, the study categorizes preferences into four key elements: character, tone, language, and purpose. The findings reveal that teenagers favor newsfluencers who are inspiring and friendly (character), are honest and direct (tone), use simple and fun speech (language), and aim to educate and inform (purpose). Participants express a desire for journalists who “talk to me as a friend”, emphasizing authenticity, emotional proximity, and conversational clarity over traditional, formal modes of reporting. These insights suggest that effective youth-oriented journalism on social media must balance factual accuracy and emotional engagement, blending education with entertainment. The research contributes to emerging scholarship on social media journalism and youth news consumption by highlighting how relational and affective communication strategies can enhance young audiences’ trust, understanding, and participation in news.

1. Introduction

Contemporary journalism is composed of emergent styles, formats, and outlets that diverge from those found within traditional journalism. In the periphery of legacy news media, certain “strangers” in journalism (Holton & Belair-Gagnon, 2018, p. 72) have risen to prominence. These include implicit interlopers, individual, or collective non-traditional actors who do not overtly challenge the journalistic field but who offer innovative approaches to reinvigorate journalism (Schapals et al., 2019; Schapals, 2022).

The Digital News Report 2024 (Newman et al., 2024, p. 16) was one of the first to have brought awareness of “youth-based news influencers around the world”, especially in the United States and Brazil, which was then extended to countries including France, Greece, and Thailand in the 2025 report (Newman et al., 2025). While still an underexplored topic in academia, the rise of the newsfluencer (Hurcombe, 2024; Schapals, 2024; Scott, 2025)—a new term defining the study of individual news producers working across content and platforms—has since gained traction because these news creators have been found to help make “journalism” more accessible to young audiences (Hurcombe, 2024).

In February 2024, a New York Times article (Maheshwari & Isaac, 2024) raised awareness of Instagram news accounts curated by digital personalities who add their own analysis to headlines from major outlets, engaging with followers in comments and through direct messages and leveraging the feedback and questions they receive to shape future posts. Since then, other major international outlets in Europe have evidenced the rise of the newsfluencer in local media, such as in France, with an article from Méta-Media (an online project from the French PBS France Télévisions) titled The Journalist Influencer (Bremme, 2024) or in Italy with an article by the editorial project LINK tied to the Italian media company Mediaset called Journalist or content creator? The rise of the info-encer (Signorelli, 2024).

Influencers who act as news sharers and commentators on social media platforms are also particularly noticeable on other social media and video networks such as TikTok and YouTube; successful examples include Hugo Travers (France), Jack Kelly (United Kingdom), or Vitus Spehar (United States). These news influencers make serious topics accessible to young audiences (Newman et al., 2024). This is at least partly corroborated by a survey with 800 teenagers (aged 13–18) in the United States, which found that 28% of respondents considered online personalities, influencers, and celebrities their preferred news sources (Robb, 2020).

Due to societal and journalistic changes, new conceptualizations of journalism—such as constructive, activist, and participatory journalism—have emerged. Researchers are now engaging with the role of emotion across the contexts of journalistic production, content, and consumption (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2019), stepping away from the long-held dichotomy separating journalism that is fact-based and neutral from another one that fits a more popular, tabloid style. Studies (see, e.g., Hendrickx, 2025; Holt et al., 2025; Melit et al., 2025; Swart, 2023) indicate the decreasing relevance of traditional news for young audiences who have instead developed their own distinct, do-it-yourself strategies for news consumption on social media, often through newsfluencers or users they have a pre-existing relationship with, including content shared by family and friends. Findings such as these make it important to consider the emotional and intuitive experiences of news (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2019). There is an inextricable link between emotions and journalism, a link that has contributed to specific dynamics in how news is produced and consumed (Beckett & Deuze, 2016).

Young people are increasingly interested in what Clark and Marchi (2019), through ethnographic research with over 200 high school students in the United States, refer to as connective journalism, in which sharing, inserting themselves into the story, and participating in the making of a story become attractive newsmaking features for youngsters (see also Hendrickx, 2021). Indeed, the editor-in-chief of Méta-Media (Bremme, 2024), a blog run by France’s public broadcaster, has stated that such a connection is evident in the content produced by newsfluencers, for whom the relationship with young followers is more bilateral, as they listen, interact, and follow the advice of their community—and sometimes even include them in their social media content.

For this study, the communication traits of newsfluencers were examined according to teenagers’ preferences when consuming news through the profiles of these digital personalities on social and video networks. While not fully extrapolatable, such analysis is of relevance as it provides the perspective of a diverse group of teenagers, complementing and expanding the narrow body of previous Portuguese and international studies by primarily focusing not on platforms used by youths but rather on language and other communication elements they prefer.

2. Literature Review

2.1. How News “Feels” in the Social Media Era

Scholarly evidence is mounting to substantiate the claim that young people experience and engage with news in dramatically different ways from previous generations. Recent studies show how consuming news via print helps foster personal relationships between audiences and “their” newspapers, highlighting the importance of touching and owning paper to foster the routinization into daily lives (Boczkowski et al., 2020; Mathews, 2024). In their Argentinian-based case study, Boczkowski et al. (2020) also stress that the dynamic behind purchasing and reading print newspapers is “not solely, or even primarily, for the information contained in their pages” (p. 655). This ties in with the three “uncomfortable truths” proposed by Swart et al. (2022) in light of what they have called “a radical audience turn in journalism”, which “challenges the assumption that the news that journalists produce is inevitably meaningful, informative, insightful, important, or relevant to users” (p. 9). Their second self-proclaimed truth negates the one-on-one relationship between news and journalism altogether, highlighting that within both the journalism industry and audiences alike, the feeling of what constitutes news or not is shifting. As stated elsewhere, this is at least partly exacerbated by the rise of social media platforms for the sourcing, producing, spreading, and ultimately consuming of news content (Hendrickx, 2021; O’Neill & Harcup, 2019).

Just as news and journalism appear to be drifting apart, news journalism in itself is increasingly dislocated from its own proprietary platforms, e.g., print media, television broadcasts, or even designated websites and apps. Most recently, the 2025 Digital News Report confirmed that social media platforms now constitute the main gateway for online news retrieval for citizens across 47 surveyed markets worldwide (Newman et al., 2025). As more and more citizens turn to platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok for their media and news consumption diets, news publishers lose power and control over the content they put out and what they want their audiences to see, hear, and read. Although mainstream journalism’s embrace of social media is far from reciprocal (Hagar & Diakopoulos, 2023), it has been noted that social media is progressively fostering its own, novel type of journalism altogether—with important, platform-distinct considerations (Hendrickx & Opgenhaffen, 2024). Similarly, Swart and Broersma (2023), based on semi-structured interviews with young people in The Netherlands, concluded that non-traditional journalistic stories such as influencer content on Instagram resemble news even if youngsters cognitively recognize that this type of content differs from conventional conceptions of what news “should” be. Media organizations’ increasing dependency on social media platforms is progressively dislocating the retrieval, production, and consumption of news (Hendrickx & Vázquez-Herrero, 2024) and altering the epistemic journalistic foundations related to truth claims, verification, and the audiences’ acceptance thereof (Ekström & Westlund, 2019).

Relatedly, the heightened scholarly and industry focus on audiences (Swart et al., 2022) and the affective dimensions of journalism (Kotišová, 2024) also points to the changing ways audiences perceive and utilize news and journalism in their everyday lives. Digitization and platformization have proven to alter the mutual expectations between audiences and journalists (Costera Meijer & Groot Kormelink, 2016), with existing boundaries and demarcations increasingly blurred also due to the rise of social media (journalism), which upends traditional, normative notions about who gets to produce and consume what media content. Resultingly, journalism is challenged in unprecedented ways as it has to vie for audience attention in highly algorithmically curated individualized social media timelines. In turn, this forces newsrooms to rethink the ways they approach, tell, and “sell” stories as they need to fit within both journalistic quality standards and the affordances and “rules” of individual social media platforms (Degen et al., 2024). This is where novel storytelling types such as the newsfluencer come into play; so-called interlopers no longer only need to emulate journalistic visual cues and standards as convincingly as possible (Belair-Gagnon & Holton, 2018), but journalists also need to mimic those of social media to make their content sufficiently relevant and engaging to younger audiences.

Assessing 111 young Dutch smartphone users, Swart and Broersma (2023) found intriguing differences between normative assumptions of what news is or should be on one hand and what users actively mark as news-related content on Instagram on the other. They argue for a more audience-centric approach in reconceptualizing news. Similarly, Hendrickx’s (2025) interview study stresses relevant differences between how young adults experience and engage with news on Instagram and TikTok. Participants found the former more “serious” and “newsworthy” than the latter, where the primary aim of consumption is to relax and be distracted from other things happening in the world.

The complexity of contemporary news retrieval (and its wider use) is further exemplified by a Swedish multi-method case study (Holt et al., 2025). The authors denote a tangled web of active and passive approaches toward finding news, although all surveyed users “acknowledged the use of social media as an important place for connecting with news, indicating the pervasive influence of these platforms in shaping news consumption habits” (p. 14).

Thus, it has become clear that social media platforms have become very disruptive in the pre-existing norms and beliefs about news and journalism, with younger audiences in particular boasting much more convoluted news consumption patterns than ever before. This article furthers the scholarly debate on young users’ engagement with news in the social media journalism era by proposing a case study that assesses news influencers and how Portuguese youth believe their most important traits and characteristics ought to be to adhere to the distinct logics and rationales of both journalism and social media platforms (Hermida & Mellado, 2020).

2.2. Contextualizing the Four-Part Formula to Brand Voice

Yumi Wilson, professor at San Francisco State University, integrated into her 2019 handbook The Social Media Journalist a specific chapter on personal branding for journalists, providing examples of how practitioners may adapt their communication style in order to develop a relationship with the audience since “the public wants to get to know the journalists behind the story” (Wilson, 2019, p. 66). By doing so, journalists may also offer a value proposition to their employer not only by providing writing expertise but also by bringing a group of followers who are already interested in the journalist’s content on social media (Holton & Molyneux, 2017).

In her chapter on personal branding for journalists, Wilson suggests strategies for journalists to develop their own personal brand on specific social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest and adds a specific formula created in 2011 by the CEO of digital marketing agency Crackerjack Marketing. This formula is featured in the 2011 article Finding your Brand Voice, published in a social media blog that brings together contributors and marketing practitioners (Schwab, 2011)

The formula is composed of four concepts associated with a brand’s voice, presented according to their specific focus (

Table 1. Schwab’s (2011) four-part formula for brand voice on social media.

Element	Description/Focus	Associated Traits/Attributes
Character/persona	Reflects the personality and identity of the brand	Friendly, warm, inspiring, playful, authoritative, professorial
Tone	Expresses attitude and emotional inflection in communication	Personal, humble, clinical, honest, direct, scientific
Language	Relates to word choice and communication style	Complex, savvy, insider, serious, simple, jargon-filled, fun, whimsical
Purpose	Defines the brand’s intent or goal in communication	Engage, educate, inform, enable, entertain, delight, sell, amplify

).

Based on Wilson’s (2019) adaptation of the four-part formula to illustrate individual journalists’ personal branding strategies, this study applies this conceptual framework as an activity to support adolescents in decodifying their preferred verbal and non-verbal communication traits for a news influencer that would be of interest to them on social and video networks.

3. Research Design

This study is designed to reveal how Portuguese adolescents imagine a potential newsfluencer to, through a specific communication style, contribute to teens’ news literacy. The study uses a qualitative methodology, involving interviews with 20 adolescents aged 13–18. Two research questions have been developed:

RQ1: What are the most important characteristics for adolescents in terms of a social media news influencer’s verbal communication style?

RQ2: What are the most important characteristics for adolescents in terms of a social media news influencer’s non-verbal communication style?

4. Study Method

For this study, a qualitative approach was chosen based on semi-structured interviews. Individual interviews were conducted with 20 adolescents based on an intersectional approach: gender and age were considered. These demographic factors—gender and age—were possible to obtain by request to the schools in which the interviews were conducted. It was deemed as relevant to include each previously referred factor to contradict the idea of generationalisms, which can be reductionist by having commonsensical appeal and thus remain uncritiqued (Selwyn, 2009). The acceptance of groups by birth age as a simple approach to describe society and expose social problems is limited because media consumers are rapidly shifting their communicative practices between innovations in short periods of time (Lim, 2016). Studies linking journalism and intersectionality have shown how digital technologies allow for marginalized audiences (including young people) to tell stories of their lived experiences and expose injustices in ways that traditional, mainstream journalism has failed to do (Richardson, 2017).

When it comes to gender and age, these specific demographic factors are considered relevant when considering children and adolescents’ digital literacy. Indeed, for the ySKILLS European project—which aimed to improve the well-being of children and adolescents by understanding and enhancing their digital skills (Donoso et al., 2021)—individual characteristics such as gender and age, along with other variables such as social characteristics and cultural environment, serve as predictors of the information and communication technology (ICT) environment (Smahel et al., 2023), of which digital skills are part.

In Portugal—one of the 13 countries participating in the ySKILLS project—a longitudinal study with 598 adolescents (12 to 17) from 2021 to 2023 (Ponte et al., 2024) aimed to analyze the evolution of digital skills among adolescents. It concluded that gender and age differences matter when it comes to the four dimensions of digital skills (technical, information, communication, and content) that are at the core of the ySKILLS project.

This study was able to obtain a diverse sample when considering the previously referred demographic factors. In close collaboration with school teams, gender (all respondents self-identified as either male or female) and age (13- to 18-year-olds) differences were obtained successfully for the sample of adolescents. For the recruitment process of schools to participate in this study, a request was first submitted and approved by the Portuguese Directorate General for Education (DGE) to conduct research in schools with minors. A list of public and private schools in Portugal was developed, and each school was contacted with a request for individual students (according to pre-defined gender and age differences) to participate in the study. From the set of schools that showed interest and availability to collaborate, three were selected. The selected schools’ students corresponded to the required criteria for this study, and the school’s staff members assisted with arranging logistics for the interview days. Ethical procedures were followed in that a consent form was developed according to the faculty’s ethical committee guidelines. This research undertaking was approved by the host institution’s ethics committee (approval number EA2409, 25 October 2022), and all participants provided informed consent prior to participation. A table is next presented to give an overview of the schools in terms of their location, age range, and gender balance (

Table 2. Overview of participating schools.

School	Location	Age Range	Gender Balance
School 1	Lisbon metropolitan area	16–18	3 male, 3 female
School 2	Rural area, ~50 km from Lisbon	13–15	3 male, 3 female
School 3	Lisbon city center	13–18	6 male, 2 female

).

In the three schools, specific teachers within the institutions organized the lead researcher’s visits. Interviews in school 1 took place over the course of two days, while in school 2 the interviews were condensed to one day. As for School 3, three different dates were needed to fully engage with students. Interviews lasted between 30 and 40 min, according to a previously prepared interview script to ensure that the structure of the interview made sense, as well as finding a plot that would allow for the targeted segment of adolescents to feel comfortable when engaging in conversation. The script was formulated according to Global Kids Online’s tools for researchers, a multinational project aimed at generating and sustaining cross-national evidence based around children’s use of the internet by creating a global network of researchers and experts (Stoilova et al., 2016). The project developed a research toolkit for academics to carry out research with children, available through the project’s website. All 20 interviews were recorded and subsequently transcribed using MAXQDA for audio-to-text transcriptions. Each participant approved of the interview being recorded.

The project followed a deductive approach by which the categories derive from category systems defined before the data was collected (Kuckartz, 2014), in this case through the categories according to the four-part formula to brand voice by Schwab (Wilson, 2019). As the formula contains four elements related to brand voice on social media—character, tone, language, and purpose—these were divided into four categories so that each text passage analyzing each element could be differentiated. Passages were first coded according to the specific choice of traits within each element; thereafter, the justification of each single word or combination of words was highlighted in the text. For each element, a separate Excel sheet was created to extract and analyze the choice of single or combined traits according to each participant, including their justification as to why such traits were selected.

Due to the nature of our study, which follows findings of a doctoral thesis, we are unable to claim that our case study of Portuguese youths’ findings are necessarily or easily transferable to other nations and/or age demographics. While we acknowledge this as a shortcoming, we also stress that our contribution lies in uncovering the traits and characteristics that youngsters associate with newsfluencers on social media, and is one of the first studies to do so.

5. Findings

A set of tables will be next presented according to the frequency that each adolescent chose one specific trait to describe their preferences associated with the newsfluencer’s character, tone, language, and purpose. Furthermore, the frequency of either two- or three-word combinations is presented as teens were asked to choose either one, two, or three words freely.

5.1. Character

In terms of character, the twenty adolescents who participated in this study were presented with six words that fit within this element according to Wilson’s (2019) reference to the four-part formula to brand voice on social media: (1) friendly, (2) warm, (3) inspiring, (4) playful, (5) authoritative, and (6) professorial. This was done for kids to define the characteristics that are more important within the category of character for a journalist aiming to build his personal brand and to be successful on social media to attract young people as news consumers (

Table 3. Frequency of single-word traits chosen for character (N = 20).

Trait	Total Mentions (n)	Notes on Gender Differences	Notes on Age Differences
Inspiring	16	Boys: 8/12 (67%) Girls: 8/8 (100%)	Chosen at all ages (100%) except 16- and 18-year-olds (75%)
Friendly	15	Boys: 10/12 (83%) Girls: 5/8 (63%)	Most common for 13- and 14-year-olds (100%); lower at age 15 (33%); ≥50% for other ages
Professorial	8	Boys: 3/12 (25%) Girls: 5/8 (63%)	Most common for 17-year-olds (100%); 50% of 14- and 18-year-olds chose it
Playful	5	Boys: 3/12 (25%) Girls: 2/8 (25%)	Most common among 15-year-olds (100%); less frequent or absent in other ages
Authoritative	3	Boys: 3/12 (25%) Girls: 0/8 (0%)	Identified by 13-, 16-, and 18-year-old boys
Warm	2	Boys: 2/12 (17%) Girls: 0/8 (0%)	One 17-year-old boy and one 18-year-old boy

).

The young respondents mostly resonated with inspiring as an important character trait for newsfluencers, notably because some feel that traditional media fails to keep up with their changing media consumption behavior, as one female respondent comments: “A journalist on social media should inspire me to know more about topics that I like. I want to feel part of the world, to contribute. But most news coming from newspapers or TV does not connect with my life experiences.” Friendliness is also assumed as an ideal characteristic as traditional journalists tend to be associated “with a more rigid personality”, whereas youngsters “prefer a style that is more relaxed”, feeling that journalists should “[talk] to me as a friend and not a random person”. These two traits appear most frequently in terms of two-word and three-word traits chosen by participants, divided equally between ages and genders. Some male respondents prefer newsfluencers to be authoritative (selected thrice in combination with friendly), whereas playful also emerged a few times. Here, one female respondent argued that “it is important that the journalists can also show themselves as people who can have fun, who can laugh and be themselves without always needing to show themselves as so serious”.

5.2. Tone

In terms of tone, the twenty adolescents who participated in this study were presented with six words that fit within this element according to Wilson’s (2019) reference to the four-part formula to brand voice on social media: (1) honest, (2) direct, (3) personal, (4) scientific, (5) humble, and (6) clinical. This was done for kids to define the characteristics that are more important within the category of tone for a journalist aiming to build his personal brand and to be successful on social media to attract young people as news consumers (

Table 4. Frequency of single-word traits chosen for tone (N = 20).

Trait	Total Mentions (n)	Notes on Gender Differences	Notes on Age Differences
Honest	17	Boys: 11/12 (92%) Girls: 6/8 (75%)	Chosen at all ages (100%) except 17- and 18-year-olds (50%)
Direct	16	Boys: 9/12 (75%) Girls: 7/8 (88%)	100% among 15- and 17-year-olds; 75% among 14-, 16-, and 18-year-olds; 67% of 13-year-olds
Personal	5	Boys: 3/12 (25%) Girls: 2/8 (25%)	Most common among 18-year-olds (75%), followed by 17-year-olds (50%) and 14-year-olds (25%)
Scientific	3	Boys: 2/12 (17%) Girls: 1/8 (13%)	One 13-year-old, one 16-year-old, and one 17-year-old
Humble	3	Boys: 2/12 (17%) Girls: 1/8 (13%)	One 16-year-old (25%) and two 18-year-olds (50%)
Clinical	0	Boys: 0 Girls: 0	None across all ages

).

The interviewees mostly resonated with honest as an important trait for newsfluencers when considering tone. Honesty is matched with authenticity in that there is a natural tone that resonates with truth for some adolescents. As one male respondent comments: “The journalist should always tell the truth, and when what he says seems too prepared, it’s weird because it seems fake.” Being direct is also essential for youngsters, in that the journalist should aim to go “straight to the point”. Even if news media professionals may have to explain complex topics, they should “at least try to speak clearly”. These two traits were selected together by half of the young respondents. Some interviewees opt for newsfluencers who have a scientific tone, arguing that information should be compared and contextualized “to make a clearer and more detailed point”.

5.3. Language

In terms of language, the twenty adolescents who participated in this study were presented with eight words that fit within this element according to Schwab’s (2011) four-part formula to brand voice on social media: (1) complex, (2) savvy, (3) insider, (4) serious, (5) simple, (6) jargon-filled, (7) fun, and (8) whimsical. This was done for kids to define the characteristics that are more important within the category of language for a journalist aiming to build his personal brand and to be successful on social media to attract young people as news consumers (

Table 5. Frequency of single-word traits chosen for language (N = 20).

Trait	Total Mentions (n)	Notes on Gender Differences	Notes on Age Differences
Simple	16	Girls: 8/8 (100%) Boys: 8/12 (67%)	Chosen at all ages (100%) except 17-year-olds (50%)
Fun	10	Girls: 5/8 (63%) Boys: 5/12 (42%)	100% among 14-, 15-, and 18-year-olds
Insider	5	Boys: 4/12 (33%) Girls: 1/8 (13%)	Found in 50% of 16- and 17-year-olds
Serious	4	Boys: 3/12 (25%) Girls: 1/8 (13%)	Present among 13-, 14-, 16-, 17-, and 18-year-olds (≈13% each)

).

The young respondents referred to four out of the eight words; thus, the non-referred traits (complex, savvy, jargon-filled, and whimsical) were excluded from the table. Teens mostly resonated with simple as an important language trait for newsfluencers. They prefer, as one female respondent comments, “words that I can understand, that will make me curious.” They complain about getting distracted and bored because “journalists on TV or the radio use language that is difficult to understand”, notably because some feel that traditional media fails to keep up with their changing media consumption behavior. As one female respondent comments, “A journalist on social media should inspire me to know more about topics that I like. I want to feel part of the world, to contribute. But most news coming from newspapers or TV does not connect with my life experiences.” Fun is also assumed as a preferred characteristic, even if teens do not necessarily see the identity of the journalist having to be that of a “humorist, they [journalists] can be funny and laugh.” Otherwise, as a male respondent argues, “it becomes boring and then I scroll”. Adolescents, when considering combinations of words, most often referred to the combination of simple and fun (7 out of 20 interviewees) but also commonly considered the words simple and insider together (4 out of 20 teens).

5.4. Purpose

In terms of purpose, the twenty adolescents who participated in this study were presented with eight words that fit within this element according to Schwab’s (2011) four-part formula to brand voice on social media: (1) engage, (2) educate, (3) inform, (4) enable, (5) entertain, (6) delight, (7) sell, and (8) amplify. This was done for kids to define the characteristics that are more important within the category of purpose for a journalist aiming to build his personal brand and to be successful on social media to attract young people as news consumers (

Table 6. Frequency of single-word traits chosen for purpose (N = 20).

Trait	Total Mentions (n)	Notes on Gender Differences	Notes on Age Differences
Educate	15	Girls: 8/8 (100%) Boys: 8/12 (67%)	Chosen at all ages (100%) except 17-year-olds (50%)
Inform	13	Boys: 8/12 (67%) Girls: 5/8 (63%)	Most common among 13- and 17-year-olds (100%); also frequent among 16- and 18-year-olds (75%)
Entertain	9	Girls: 5/8 (63%) Boys: 4/12 (50%)	Most frequent among 13- and 15-year-olds (67%), followed by 14- and 18-year-olds (50%)
Engage	8	Boys: 5/12 (42%) Girls: 3/8 (38%)	Most common among 17-year-olds (100%), followed by 14- and 16-year-olds (50%)
Amplify	7	Girls: 5/8 (63%) Boys: 2/12 (17%)	Found among 14-, 16-, 17-, and 18-year-olds (50% each)

).

The young respondents mostly resonated with educate as an important trait for newsfluencers when considering purpose. Adolescents consider that at such a young age and while still attending schools, journalists need to “educate us on what is happening around the world just as teachers explain mathematics, history and geography.” Instead, as one male respondent points out, “they [journalists] talk to me as if they were talking to my mother and father who already went to school, university and who work for many years”. The word educate can be found in combination with one or two other words when it comes to youngsters’ preferences, such as educate and engage or educate, entertain, and inform. Indeed, inform is also valued as a single trait when it comes to a newsfluencer’s purpose since it “is his job to do so”, as argued by a female respondent. As for engage, such a trait is valued by youngsters because in order to enjoy newsfluencers’ content, it is important that “they ask questions, propose challenges and talk about their day.” Otherwise, as highlighted by a male respondent, “if I am only seeing someone speak about the news and that’s it, I’ll be bored and I won’t follow”.

6. Discussion

When consuming information on social media platforms and video networks such as Instagram and TikTok through newsfluencers, most teens in our study explicitly express an aim to connect in terms of character with someone who they perceive as inspiring and friendly. Both words were commonly referred to individually but also in combination with each other. Furthermore, in terms of tone, the majority of interviewed adolescents seek journalists who they perceive as honest and direct. The two traits were frequently referred to individually but also combined with each other. Moreover, when it comes to language, youngsters prefer it to be simple and fun. These traits were also commonly referred to in combination with each other. Last, when it comes to purpose, most teens prefer a journalist who educates and informs. Although both words were the most selected individually, when looking at combinations of two or three words, the term entertaining also becomes relevant to consider. In the case of two-word combinations, the most frequently common mix is of educate and entertain.

When considering gender differences in our sample, girls are more frequently choosing the word inspiring, while boys are more often choosing friendly. As for tone, the word honest is more commonly chosen among boys, while the word direct was more commonly chosen among girls. In terms of language, girls chose both simple and fun more often. Last, in terms of purpose, the word educate was more commonly chosen by girls, while the word inform is more common among boys. As for age variation, the results were quite scattered. Here, the most salient presence is friendly, for which the two youngest age segments—13- and 14-year-olds—chose this specific word. As for tone, all 15- and 17-year-olds chose direct as the most relevant trait associated with this element. Moreover, for language, all 14-, 15- and 18-year-olds consider fun to be the most important trait connected to language. And last, for purpose, all 13- and 17-year-olds chose inform as an important word connected to this element.

These findings shine a reinvigorated light on how journalists negotiate character traits stemming from traditional journalistic and novel social media logics and dynamics in presenting themselves to predominantly younger audiences as authoritative figures who share factual information and provide much-needed context to today’s current affairs while also doing so in a way that is sufficiently engaging to keep teenagers’ attention. This is by no means an easy exercise and will continue to be the cause of numerous trial and error exercises in newsrooms around the world. Striking the right balance between entertaining and informing can be difficult, but there are clear examples of what does appear to work—one being the newscaster Susanne Daubner, one of the faces of the leading German evening television news broadcast who also appears on the news outlet’s TikTok page rapping and presenting the local youth word of the year. Obviously rapping is not something that every traditional journalist will feel comfortable with, but this singular case can serve as a guiding example on how news and information can be transmitted in a more accessible, relaxed way without compromising on journalistic merit or authority. The question is also how traditional news outlets who want to be active on social media will be able to remain co-existing peacefully with independent newsfluencers who may be more popular in terms of followers and engagement but may adhere to lesser extents to journalistic norms and values such as presenting unbiased information and offering a plurality of voices represented in reporting. It is likely that traditional journalists and newsfluencers will continue to learn from each other, hopefully strengthening each other in the years to come.

We also position our findings within the growing body of research that lays bare the complex media and news consumption patterns of today’s young people (Hendrickx, 2025; Holt et al., 2025; Melit et al., 2025; Swart, 2023). While this subject matter is gaining traction at the time of writing, the existing body of scholarly works thus far remains limited. The Swedish case study of Holt et al. (2025) found that only a minority of young respondents expressed overt “expectations of impartiality, openness, brand identification and facticity”, as opposed to a larger group that “defines news in a more open way, as things that happen in the world” (p. 9). Notwithstanding this, a recent US-based study among active young TikTok users found that “traditional journalistic principles such as information utility, accuracy, and credibility” are still highly valued (Cheng et al., 2025), confirming the endurance of normative journalistic markers that also resonated in our study. Young people, it appears, actively shift between platforms and carriers, digital and traditional, and are in general highly interested in what is happening near them as well as elsewhere in the world. Yet, our results confirm that many young people feel that “old” ways of presenting news (television broadcasts and print media) insufficiently cater to their specific media habits and needs. This poses problems for legacy news outlets to reach young audiences and increasingly become dependent on third-party platforms (Ekström & Westlund, 2019) but also offers novel opportunities for media practitioners and researchers alike to reimagine the very meaning of news and information in the era of a dynamic, fast evolving social media landscape. More scholarly scrutiny at the methodological, empirical, and conceptual level is necessary in the coming years to keep a close eye on this rapidly evolving development.

Our study does not come without its shortcomings. We presented a case study specific to Portugal, although we distinguished metropolitan and rural audiences. This renders comparisons across nations and markets more difficult. Our number of interviews is limited, but as we reached a natural saturation point, we argue that it is sufficient to draw meaningful findings and offer recommendations to fellow scholars to continue to investigate the importance youngsters ascribe to these newsfluencers across societies and age demographics. The interviews also used a top-down approach of asking respondents to consider attributing a set list of traits to newsfluencers, limiting their freedom to come up with their own desired characteristics. While our results are not necessarily transferrable to other markets and should not be seen as representative of a wider cross-section of society, they still offer relevant insights into young people’s perception of contemporary news expectations and habits.

7. Conclusions

This study analyzed how Portuguese adolescents imagine an ideal news influencer or newsfluencer (Hurcombe, 2024) along with their desired verbal and non-verbal communication traits on social media platforms. To this end, 20 semi-structured interviews were held with adolescents aged 13–18, who all self-identified as either male or female. Four personal brand voice elements—character, tone, language, and purpose—were considered and categorized to understand how Portuguese adolescents prefer a newsfluencer to act on social media to capture their attention. In terms of verbal communication (language), adolescents look for a journalist who can transmit simplified information, yet also someone who can be fun. This means that the interviewed teens do not connect with the language associated with traditional news media journalists, preferring news that is useful, interesting, and also fun to know about. As for non-verbal communication, assessing newsfluencers’ character, tone, and purpose, teens prefer to consume news through a journalist who is able to inspire them and engage with them in a friendly manner (character). They also prefer a journalist who is both honest and direct (tone), delivering news and information in a straightforward manner. Last, adolescents prefer to see an individual news source on social media who aims to educate and inform them (purpose). However, when wanting to be informed, our young respondents seek a type of infotainment that can trigger their attention, which is connected to an informal approach in terms of language and character. This is akin to the journalist befriending—or at least empathizing—with youngsters, developing a relationship based on honesty and proximity, thus resembling a peer rather than an authority.

These findings are meaningful and relevant for scholars and practitioners at the intersection of social media platforms and journalism. From a more scholarly perspective, our study adds nuance to existing scholarship on youth news consumption by highlighting that while their appreciation of traditional journalistic markers persists, such appreciation is conditional upon adapted modes of presentation. Put differently, successful youth engagement does not require abandoning journalistic values per se but rather translating them to the logics of social media platforms. Additionally, our study contributes to digital journalism theory by highlighting character, tone, language, and purpose as analytically useful dimensions to further our understanding of youth-based news consumption. More practically, if consuming news via these platforms will continue to become even more important than it already is as a primary information resource for today’s young people, journalism as an industry will need to profoundly alter the ways in which it assembles, packages, and distributes news and do so in ways probably still unimaginable today. This includes the importance as infotainment (Harrington, 2017) as a genre to capture youth attention, as well the value of friendliness, honesty, and directness as core communicative traits espoused by newsfluencers.

Ultimately, it is important to note that the adolescents in our sample are still very aware of—and even actively appreciate—traditional markers of journalism such as factuality, authority, and truthfulness, although the ways in which information is presented will need to continue to adapt significantly to keep up with young people’s ever-changing media and news consumption habits and preferences.