Design communication among school students shaping through media

Today’s news is not news. Its content. Gen Zs aren’t consuming news the way millennials

did, when people used to sit down for evening primetime shows. The structure of

announcing the top 10 headlines, in which anchors used to give bullet-point information on

the top stories, is now obsolete. The vitality of news now is about its virality.

For many young students, news is not accessed through full reports but through forwarded

links, influencer commentary, or peer conversations. Awareness exists, but context is thin.

They know what happened, but rarely why it happened or how it connects to larger systems.

In this environment, information is consumed quickly, emotionally, and often without

verification. The result is not ignorance, but incomplete understanding.

Three clear patterns define how students consume news today.

First, attention is now unattainable. In this digital era, nobody has the time to pay attention.

Hence, news is rarely consumed as sustained reporting. It appears in fragments — between

reels, inside social feeds, layered between entertainment content. The format encourages

scrolling, not reflection.

Second, the veracity is always in question. Verified journalism sits beside memes, influencer

commentary, satire, and partisan opinion — all in the same visual hierarchy. For a student

without strong media literacy, credibility becomes difficult to distinguish. Authority is

flattened.

Third, emotion drives engagement. Sensational crises, celebrity controversies, and dramatic

visuals dominate attention. Slow-moving civic issues — policy debates, governance

processes, institutional reforms — struggle to compete. Over time, this skews perception.

What is dramatic appears important. What is procedural appears irrelevant.

These patterns create both risks and opportunities. The risk is a shallow, anxiety-prone civic

awareness. The opportunity is that students are reachable through formats they already use:

short explainers, interactive quizzes, classroom-friendly explainer videos, and educator-

moderated discussions can turn passive exposure into active learning.