Wednesday 5th July: Young people most vulnerable to fake news

Good morning! Today's newsletter is brought to you by Esther.

We’re less than two weeks away from the first Publisher Newsletter Awards, celebrating the best emails in the industry. We’ll be having a summer party at The Green Room, Colours Hoxton on Monday 17th July, and there are only a few tickets left. See you there?

Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by the Publisher Newsletter Awards. (Book this ad slot)

We’ve talked many times on the podcast about the differences between the various generations and the relative levels of media literacy. A study a few years ago showed that older people were more than 4x more likely to have shared fake news on Facebook than the younger generation.

But the young ‘uns might not be as alright as we’d assumed. A misinformation susceptibility test developed by the University of Cambridge has found that young people are actually more susceptible to fake news, and are worse at identifying false headlines. This runs contrary to the widely-held belief that the more chronologically accomplished among us are less savvy because they haven’t grown up online.

More worryingly, the more ‘online’ the participants were, the less likely they were to be able to tell the real news from misinformation. There are some other fascinating findings, and you can test your own susceptibility (which I’ll be doing during the next baby nap…)

All bar one of the UK’s top-selling titles are now being printed by Walstead, headquartered in London, the last remaining UK-based operation with the scale to handle them. Liverpool-based Prinovis, which is owned by the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann, told clients in November that it was shutting due to the “significant decline” in the UK magazine market and the soaring cost of paper.

Good GRIEF. The Bournemouth Observer, which claims to be a new independent title serving Bournemouth, Poole and Christchurch, has been launched with a bunch of fake journalist profiles. Not only that, it looks like it may be using AI generated content to report on ‘incidents’ in the area after police said they couldn’t find records of what was being reported by the site. Kudos to HTFP for being on the ball with this.

Several large news and magazine publishers are discussing the formation of a coalition to address the impact of AI on the industry. It’s always good to see collaboration especially when faced with threats like this (see above!) but I can’t help feeling that the horse has very much bolted in this scenario.

More from Media Voices