Maybe Gen Z did not stop consuming news. Maybe news stopped looking like news

From the 7pm bulletin to TikTok, Instagram and X, Kenya’s young people have not abandoned current affairs — they have simply changed the door they walk through

By Hadassah Karangu

There was a time when the evening news was something close to a family ritual. At 7pm, the television would be switched on and the living room would go quiet as households waited to hear what had happened across the country. Others caught up through the morning radio, a purchased newspaper or the evening bulletin. Being informed had a familiar routine, a recognisable shape.

That shape has changed.

For many young Kenyans today, the television is no longer the first stop when they want to know what is happening. The radio may be playing somewhere in the background, but it is rarely the primary source. Instead, the first thing many young people reach for when they wake up is their phone. They scroll through TikTok, check Instagram, open X, scan WhatsApp statuses and group chats. Before breakfast, they may have already encountered political debates, economic news, sports updates, international events and footage of something that happened somewhere in the country overnight.

Which raises a question worth sitting with. Have young people — Gen Z in particular — stopped caring about the news, or have they simply changed where they go to find it?

The evidence suggests the latter. Perhaps Gen Z did not stop consuming news. Perhaps news stopped looking like news.

The traditional understanding of news was closely tied to institutions. Television stations, radio stations, newspapers and professional journalists decided what deserved public attention and delivered it at a set time. People waited for the news to come to them.

That relationship no longer holds.

News can now find a young person in the middle of something entirely unrelated. Someone scrolling TikTok for entertainment may come across a short video explaining a political development. A person opening Instagram to look at photographs may encounter a breaking story. Someone checking X may discover that a major national event is already being discussed tens of thousands of times before they have seen a single television bulletin.

News is no longer necessarily something we go looking for. Sometimes it finds us.

This is where digital platforms and content creators have fundamentally altered the media landscape. Popular pages and digital communities have become part of the information environment in which young people live. For many, these are where a story first surfaces — before they search for further detail elsewhere. A young person might see a headline on a social media page, watch a short video explaining it, discuss it with friends and eventually arrive at reporting from a mainstream outlet. The journey to the news has changed, even when the destination is the same.

But there is a distinction that cannot be overlooked. Information is not the same as journalism.

Social media has made it possible for almost anyone with a smartphone and a connection to become a source of information. A person at the scene of an event can record and share it within seconds. A content creator can explain a complicated issue to thousands from their bedroom. A trending post can reach an enormous audience before a newsroom has finished verifying the details.

That is a genuine democratisation of access, and it has created opportunities that previous generations did not have.

It has also created a serious problem.

The same phone that can deliver accurate information can deliver rumours, manipulated footage, misleading headlines and outright falsehoods. On social media, the most popular story is not necessarily the most accurate one. A dramatic headline attracts views. A shocking video gets shared thousands of times. A controversial opinion generates more engagement than a carefully verified report. The algorithm is not designed to ensure that people receive what they genuinely need. It is designed to keep them watching, clicking, sharing and coming back.

As a result, two young people can open the same application on the same morning and experience entirely different versions of events. One sees politics. Another sees entertainment. Another sees sport. Someone else spends the morning watching comedy without encountering a single significant national story — and yet feels informed because they were online.

This is where the conversation becomes more complex than the familiar complaint that Gen Z does not watch the news.

Young people may not be less interested in what is happening around them. They may simply have different expectations about how information should reach them. They want speed. They want visuals. They want explanation. They want to comment, question and participate. They do not want to wait until 7pm to find out what happened at noon.

Traditional media cannot afford to dismiss that as indifference. The audience has changed. The technology has changed. The habits have changed. The way journalism reaches people must change with them.

This is not an argument that traditional journalism has become irrelevant. In fact, the opposite may be closer to the truth. When information is everywhere, verification becomes more important, not less. A journalist’s job is not simply to be first to post something. It is to verify, contextualise, attribute and hold to account. It is to distinguish between what is known, what is alleged and what has not yet been established. That discipline matters most precisely when a misleading post can travel across a country in minutes.

Young people need more than access to information. They need media literacy — the habit of asking: who is saying this, where did it come from, has it been verified, is this fact or opinion, what evidence exists and, perhaps most usefully, what is missing?

The challenge is not that young Kenyans use TikTok, Instagram, X or WhatsApp to stay informed. The challenge is whether they can navigate those platforms without surrendering entirely to what the platforms decide they should believe.

That challenge matters beyond media. Kenya’s young population is not simply a future audience. It is an active constituency. Young people will vote, build businesses, enter leadership, shape public conversation and raise the next generation. What they know, what they believe and how they form those beliefs has consequences for the country.

Perhaps the older Kenyan sitting in a living room watching the 7pm bulletin and the young person lying on a hostel bed scrolling through TikTok are not as different as they appear. Both are trying to answer the same basic question: what is happening in the world around me? The difference is the door they use to find out.

For one generation, that door is television, radio and print. For another, it is TikTok, Instagram, X, YouTube and WhatsApp. The newsroom may still exist, but the audience has moved.

Gen Z did not abandon the news. The news changed its language, its format and its location, and followed them into their phones. The real challenge for journalism is not persuading young people to return to the television at 7pm. It is reaching them where they already are, while ensuring that speed never entirely replaces accuracy, popularity never replaces truth and entertainment never becomes a substitute for the work of reporting.

The audience is already scrolling. The question is what it will find when it gets there.

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