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Photo courtesy Jack Brewster
I've been in conversations about Gen Z audiences for years.
Newsroom strategy sessions. Industry panels. Conference keynotes. Everyone seems to have a theory about what young people want from journalism.
Most of those theories are wrong.
I know because I sat down with Jack Brewster, who started Newsreel, a mobile-first news app built to help younger audiences make sense of the world without feeling overwhelmed. Jack’s a journalist. He did a Fulbright to study how young people get their news. Then he spent years trying to fix the problem, not just talk about it.
What he told me stopped me cold.
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The Empathy Gap Is the Trust Gap
When I asked Jack what journalists most misunderstand about Gen Z, he didn't go where I expected. He didn't talk about formats, platforms, or algorithms.
He talked about empathy.
"The biggest thing journalists miss when it comes to trust," he told me, "is how it's the same thing as why we miss out on trust when we're talking to people in our everyday lives. It's earned through empathy."
He believes journalists haven't done enough work sitting in what he calls "the soup"—memes, hot takes, raw clips, commentary—the actual media environment that shaped how younger people process information. Because they haven't spent enough time immersed in it, they don't understand it. Without that understanding, they lack empathy for how Gen Z reads, watches, and decides what to believe.
That's not a technology failure. That's a relationship failure.
Here's what kills me: We've been talking about trust in journalism for a decade, and we keep framing it as a credibility problem. A standards problem. A misinformation problem. But Brewster is pointing at something more uncomfortable: it's an empathy problem. And you can't fix an empathy problem with a brand refresh.
All Broccoli, No Cake
There's a phrase Jack used that I haven't been able to shake.
He's watched the rise of trust-focused journalism initiatives. The nonprofit investments. The transparency projects. The media literacy campaigns. He said he believes in the goal. He even worked for one of these organizations.
But he sees a systemic flaw in how these efforts operate.
"If it's all broccoli," he told me, "nobody's going to look at it or care. If you're not coating it in cake, it doesn't matter how worthy it is."
He pointed specifically to browser extensions that rate news sources and remind users what's credible. Noble idea. But "nobody uses it as a consumer," he said. "They don't want to be told what to do on the internet. They don't want someone wagging a finger."
The brutal truth? You cannot tell people to trust you. Trust initiatives that live outside people's actual daily media habits, however well-funded and well-intentioned, largely reach the already-converted. The people who most need to build better news habits aren't installing browser extensions. They're on TikTok.
The trust has to get injected into the experience itself. It has to be earned where people already are, in a format they actually choose.
That's what Newsreel is trying to do, and what legacy media has lagged behind in attempting.
Discovery Is Backwards Now
One of the sharpest things Brewster said about Gen Z news behavior: the discovery process is completely flipped.
Older news consumers were trained to go to a trusted source, such as a newspaper front page, a network newscast, or a homepage, and let editors decide what mattered. The institution curated reality. You trusted the institution. Therefore, you trusted the news.
That model is gone.
"They tend to want to see the raw clip first," Jack told me. "Even a commentator talking about something. And then, if they're interested, they'll decide to go deeper."
My own daughter does this. She's 24, grew up in a household where sourcing was practically a family religion, and her first move on a story is still TikTok. Then, if something catches her, she'll Google it. She's not going to the New York Times homepage. Nobody her age is.
What this means for journalism is profound. Institutions used to be the front door. Now they're, at best, the second click. And that's only if you earned it.
The outlets still optimizing for the front-door model are building beautiful lobbies that nobody walks into.
Fighting the Last War—or the One Before It
I asked Jack whether legacy media might eventually win back younger audiences once they settle down, buy homes, and have kids. The old "they'll come around when they grow up" theory.
He was blunt.
"We've never seen a generation fall into the same pattern as the previous one," he said. "We're playing the wrong war. Journalists are begrudgingly getting onto more video-native platforms, and the real fight has already moved on. It's going to be with AI."
He said this with the kind of quiet certainty that comes from having studied the data rather than hoped against it.
We're not just one trend behind. In some cases, we're two. Newsrooms that are still debating whether to take vertical video seriously will look up to find that the audience has moved to AI-personalized feeds and hyper-intimate communities where trust is built on micro-connections rather than institutional affiliation.
And here's where Brewster's insight cuts deepest: He said something I've written about extensively and heard echoed by others, but rarely stated this directly. Brand affiliation used to matter. Being associated with a recognizable masthead meant something. It conveyed credibility by proximity.
"I've been shocked," he told me. "It's not only that that's no longer true. It's the opposite."
The logo is not just neutral now. In some cases, it's a liability.
What Newsreel is Actually Building
Newsreel isn't trying to make news more digestible for its own sake. Brewster is after something bigger.
The tagline is: Understand the world and your place in it. He emphasizes the second half.
Young people are drowning in opinions and have fewer tools to orient themselves. They can't tell where a source sits on the ideological or credibility spectrum. Brewster's team has built a database of more than 300 commentators — political figures, media personalities, thought leaders — categorized across multiple dimensions. Not just left-center-right, which he finds reductive, but nuanced layers that help users understand who they're listening to.
"If you went to a newsstand, you'd see Time magazine and know roughly where they sat," he said. "Now people have no idea."
He's also building community into the product, betting that as AI handles personalization, what will differentiate platforms is human connection: a sense of belonging, of being in a place with people who care about the same things.
It's a smart bet. And it's one legacy newsrooms could be making, too, if they weren't so busy protecting infrastructure that fewer people use.
The question Jack Brewster is answering isn't really about apps, formats, or Gen Z.
It's about what trust actually requires in 2026.
Not a rating system. Not a transparency report. Not a "trust initiative."
It requires empathy. It requires showing up where people are. It requires making the broccoli taste like something people actually want.
The journalists who figure that out, whether inside legacy institutions or outside them, are the ones who will still have an audience in ten years.
The rest will keep asking why no one is watching.
What do you think? Are legacy newsrooms capable of making this shift, or is the window closing?
Reply and tell me.
I read everything.