The media industry is obsessed with finding ways to reach young people, often concluding that Gen Z is \u2018fickle\u2019 and unattainable. But The Spinoff\u2019s social first explainer series, Now You Know, is proving otherwise.<\/p>\n
With over 2.5 million views in just 10 weeks, Now You Know<\/a> has captured the attention of 18-24 year-olds. Launched in July, the NZ On Air-funded series has tackled topics like boot camp trials, NCEA changes, recognition of Palestinian statehood, unemployment, big tech and government debt.<\/p>\n A new study<\/a> from the Pew Research Center found that 43% of adults under the age of 30 in the US say they regularly get news on TikTok, up from 9% in 2020. This year\u2019s Reuters Institute Digital News<\/a> report presented a tipping point for news consumption behaviour among under-35s in the US. Over half (54% of 18\u201324s and 50% of 25\u201334s) now identify social media and video networks as their main source of news. As The Spinoff\u2019s head of audience, Anna Rawhiti-Connell, wrote<\/a> when the series launched, \u201cit\u2019s safe to assume these trends are being replicated here.\u201d<\/p>\n On this week\u2019s episode of The Fold<\/a>, Duncan Greive sits down with Anna and Now You Know host Robbie Nicol to break down the highly successful strategy behind The Spinoff\u2019s social-first news explainer series.<\/p>\n Anna and Robbie discuss the philosophy of treating young people as worthy news consumers, the intentional craft used to blend serious journalism with platform-native comedy, how the episodes get made, and the differences in distributing content across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts.<\/p>\n The following is an edited and condensed version of an episode of\u00a0The Fold<\/a>. Listen in full on\u00a0Apple Podcasts<\/a>,\u00a0Spotify<\/a>\u00a0or wherever you listen to podcasts.<\/p>\n On why the gig appealed to Robbie and the importance of the host<\/p>\n Robbie Nicol: I grew up loving Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and started mimicking them with a series called White Man Behind A Desk, and have continued doing it ever since. When I saw a job being advertised at The Spinoff saying, \u201cHey, we\u2019re gonna make a bunch of short form videos explaining the news to young people\u201d, I thought, \u201cI could do that. I could give that a go.\u201d It was a very exciting moment.\u00a0<\/p>\n Anna Rawhiti-Connell: We knew we needed a face. It\u2019s a bit of borrowing from creator media. We wanted someone that people would relate to, who they could trust, and who would take on the role three times a week of explaining a big news item.<\/p>\n [Now You Know] is pastiche. Robbie brought a universe of stylistic film, television and social media references\u2026 and an understanding of what people react and respond to.<\/p>\n On not treating younger audiences as unattainable \u2018exotic zoo animals\u2019<\/p>\n RN: Young people don\u2019t have short attention spans. They\u2019ve got short consideration spans.<\/p>\n ARC: [Now You Know] was born of a desire to buck some of the generalisations around young people\u2019s engagement with news. Just because they\u2019re not reading it on a website doesn\u2019t mean that they\u2019re not engaging with it. I have read a lot recently around the fact that young people are willing to pay for news. It\u2019s just format based. They trust a particular person or a creator, rather than an institution.<\/p>\n I tend to try and talk about people as a collection of interests, beliefs and values, rather than demographic information, like age.<\/p>\n The crucial blend of substance and style<\/p>\n Duncan Greive: I saw a presentation that you circulated earlier, and it talks about a golden ratio of number of jokes per minute. How do you balance \u201chere are your vegetables and here\u2019s some lollies\u201d?<\/p>\n RN: I want people to know things and to understand I really care. But my background is also in writing comedy, so it just comes out that way.<\/p>\n Not all of our videos are funny. There are still rules that apply: storytelling, communicating and explaining to people why they should care because the issue matters. Humour is a really useful tool, but it\u2019s not the only tool you can use to get people to watch a video.<\/p>\n I have learned that you can throw all the sparkle, glitter and showbiz onto something, and if they don\u2019t care about the topic, then they won\u2019t watch the video.<\/p>\n Balancing public interest journalism on algorithmic platforms<\/p>\n DG:\u00a0 There\u2019s always this danger of being drawn into mercilessly following what the algorithm tells you to do. I think some of the art of Now You Know is \u201cno, we\u2019re going to try and do this really hard thing, and it might fail, but we have to try\u201d. That\u2019s the public media element of it.<\/p>\n RN: I think fundamentally people do have to care about the subject. We\u2019re learning all of these skills to then apply them to things that people find \u201cboring\u201d and \u201cuninteresting\u201d, and then we will do our best to leverage as many views as we can possibly get for the thing that \u201cnobody cares about\u201d. <\/p>\n Listen in full on\u00a0Apple Podcasts<\/a>,\u00a0Spotify<\/a>\u00a0or wherever you listen to podcasts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The media industry is obsessed with finding ways to reach young people, often concluding that Gen Z is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":55015,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[492,156,1073,111,139,46454,69,46455],"class_list":{"0":"post-55014","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-comments-enabled","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-media","11":"tag-new-zealand","12":"tag-newzealand","13":"tag-now-you-know","14":"tag-nz","15":"tag-the-fold"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55014\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}