A 24-minute video from a select committee hearing on lobbying, Rishi Sunak’s debut address as Prime Minister, and a speech given on Ukraine by the Kenyan ambassador to the UN hardly sound like catnip to the archetypal young person.
After all, it has become a truism that Gen Z and younger millennials possess five-second attention spans and only enjoy trivial content on make-up tutorials or pranks.
And yet—with view counts ranging between 4.4m and 3.1m—these are three of the top five most watched YouTube videos by the digital publisher Politics Joe, which this week was named one of the UK’s five ‘most mentioned’ news brands in the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2024.
The social-first news publisher was an incongruous presence on a list that, Politics Joe aside, solely comprised titans of the so-called ‘legacy media’ like BBC News, The Guardian and ITV News that supplement their digital news with traditional print or broadcast journalism.
Founded in 2017 as an offshoot of digital lad mag JOE.co.uk, the channel has carved out a niche in the UK media landscape, speaking unapologetically brashly and light-heartedly about the issues that young people care about.
“I would say that a lot of the other media does a pretty bad job of catering to our audience,” Oli Dugmore, head of of Politics Joe tells City A.M. “A lot of the broadsheets spend more time talking about pensions, retirement and property prices, rather than the lack of accessibility to the housing market and tuition fees.
“That makes sense given the demographic that buys newspapers, and they’re important issues, but it means there’s a gap, and we fill it… there’s no secret sauce.”
Credit: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism & University of Oxford
Engaging the elusive Gen Z
Dugmore talks of the channel’s success as if its being able to get over 250,000 followers on X and 0.5m subscribers on Youtube were a matter of course.
“We make good, interesting content, in the language that our audience speaks, on the platforms that they use, and they then come to us,” he says.
Yet attracting a loyal, engaged, young audience has proven to be a chimera for dozens of news brands that have tried, some of which have pumped huge amounts of resources or attracted millions of pounds in seed capital to do so.
In 2021, The News Movement was launched by the former editorial director at BBC News Kamal Ahmed and ex-Dow Jones chief Will Lewis, promising news and original reporting “where [Gen Z] want it”. It raised a healthy $15m (then £11.7m) before going live, but has struggled to gain the following and traction of Dugmore’s leaner, brasher operation.
“There’s this perception that to build successful a youth media brand it has to be millennial pink and called something bold… and it doesn’t,” the journalist says. “And there’s this condescension in a lot of the coverage you see aiming at young people. They don’t just care about tuition fees, for example. Their political interests are far more varied and nuanced. They care about arms export licences, housing, the climate. We’re a champion for those issues and for our audience.”
Dugmore’s prognosis is one with which Abi Watson, senior media analyst at Enders Analysis, agrees. “Resonating with young people is not about having this patronising view that Gen Z and young millennials want their news to be overly simple and dumbed down in order for it to appeal to them,” she tells City A.M.
“Far more important is that it is in the format and tone that works well on the platforms it’s posted.”
By ‘platforms,’ Watson refers to the social media channels that are now becoming a core medium through which all adults—but particularly younger adults—get their news. According to Ofcom, just under half of the adults in the UK use social media for news. This figure rises to 71 per cent among 16-24-year-olds.
Flight to video and commentary
A byproduct of this has been the growing premium put on video gets over written reporting. Politics Joe is video only, with content varying from vox pops of people in the street, long-form interviews with big names like Paul Hislop and Noam Chomsky, and edits made to go viral with titles like ‘Just Rishi Sunak being insanely weird‘ and ‘Mick Lynch [the union leader] wipes the floor with Tory MPs‘.
“It’s obviously not just young people that get a lot of their news from videos social media, but they are always the first adaptors of new technology,” says Enders’s Watson. “Outlets’ reach is gained from platforms like Instagram and TikTok, which helps build awareness of the brand, and that can help inculcate a more committed following and native browsing.”
However, the young audience’s preference for video does not mean that content must be restricted to 90-second soundbites.
“Something you’ll often hear is that ‘this is the age of the diminished attention span’ and ‘people will only watch a 30-second TikTok’,” says Dugmore.
“Well, a million people will watch an edit we put up of a dry, procedural select committee. It’s just not true that people have reduced attention spans – Joe Rogan has the most popular podcast on the internet and his episodes are three hours long.”
Where does the money come from?
However impressive a publisher’s audience numbers, the widely reported struggles of major publishers like Reach and Newsquest have shown that page views don’t always translate to a healthy balance sheet.
Aided by its very lean cost base and time-efficient content that prioritises edits and interviews over original reporting, Dugmore’s outfit has largely survived on the scraps fed to it by social media platforms. But it is looking to diversify.
“Politics Joe has always covered its own costs [and has never needed to be compensated by the Joe masterbrand],” Dugmore says. “And we’ve always wanted to keep a separation of Church and State between us and Joe who do more branded content. But we are looking to diversify. We’ll be doing live events for our podcast, we’re thinking about some e-commerce, and we’re looking at a supporter-based model with the caveat that our journalism would always also be free to access.”
When the live show comes around, one hopes they have more planned than simply recreating one of their viral a select committees or UN hearings on stage. Or maybe that will be an unexpected hit, too.