News made for a younger audience

By Michael Yon 5 Min Read

If we break down the last 80 years we can see multiple shifts in style and theme (at least when it comes to the United States that is). Each generation grew up in a completely different setting from the ones after it.

If your young adult years took place in the 60’s or early 70’s there’s no doubt that you would highly be influenced by the Vietnam War, anti-war propaganda, the fight for civil rights, and the music that conveyed those themes.

Each generation has experienced different events and popular culture that has irrevocably affected their attitudes toward the world. Today it’s all the rage for older people to talk about how younger people are being affected by technology. Before that, it was their parents talking to them about rap and drugs.

And even before that, it was their parents talking to them about going off to war and not being a hippie, My point is that each generation evolves with the times and has certain views on certain issues.

Before this technological boom we have experienced, people would get their news from newspapers and television. If you were a younger person would turn off the news and go meet with your friends to talk about issues that weren’t being discussed on television, because the generation before you controlled the media and output of information.

That is true even today, except that now you very nearly can’t escape the output of information. Everywhere you go the output of information is constantly streaming to your phone. Even if you turn off your television and refuse to buy a newspaper, and go meet your friends at an isolated location, a quick scroll through facebook or twitter might land you back into the very same place you were trying to escape from: a place where information is controlled by an older generation.

Sometimes I even swipe through my phone just to get to an app and if I swipe too far I pull up a page about the mainstream news that is always being updated by phone. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, all I’m trying to say is that information sharing today is so streamlined that you can’t escape it and you are constantly being forced to interact with information output that is being controlled by an older generation than yours. I doubt that anyone could go an entire week with being exposed to it in one way or another.

So, if you wanted to escape the constant flow of information being controlled by older generations than yours, what could you do? Luckily for you, creativity has been streamlined in today’s world of technology.

Now, you can refer to TheSkimm: “a must-read newsletter for millennials.” TheSkimm is a newsletter that was created by two former journalists. It now has an app and is a daily source of information for more than 4 million millennials.

It was founded by Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg in 2012. Since then it has amassed nearly $16.5 million in funding. TheSkimm is targeted at primarily urban women from the ages of 22-34. It uses a concentrated way of looking at the news and utilizes a simple and condensed format to appeal to a younger audience.

They wanted to create an easy-to-read way of looking at the news. According to their website their daily newsletter “gives you all the news you need to start your day.”

I for one love the idea of subscribing to a newsletter run by the people of a younger generation than all the other mainstream news sources. This way I and others can receive information that corresponds to the way we were brought up in the 21st century.

Photo by G. Crescoli on Unsplash

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