Making Teenagers Read Newspapers. A Nationwide Experiment in French High Schools (cepr.org)

44 pointsby neehao18 hours ago66 comments

SoftTalker 18 hours ago

Major newspapers and even local ones (if they still exist) have been so dumbed down in the past few decades. I would estimate that many are now written to target a less-than-high-school literacy level. Worse, news often seems to be written to elicit outrage or fear (probably because "engagement").

neehao 18 hours ago

fair. plausibly tested what's easy enough to do and still seems like a win. we need a separate treatment for increasing informativeness of news.

berytos_storm 18 hours ago

It’s admittedly been a long time since I looked at a local newspaper, but I do seem them occasionally. Kinda seems like the local ones are just the local news segment in text format. Fine, but I can read that on my phone or watch it on the TV with much more convenience. Maybe there’s some interesting stuff left in classified ads or whatnot, but a lot of that shit so on marketplace now.

bluGill 18 hours ago

Local is where getting the news is the hardest. My local school board meets at the same time as the local zoning board...

My town publishes city meeting minutes - "debated to change zoning regulations in [development], it passed 2-3". What changes were made? What were the debate points? Once I get that information who do I vote for/against in the next election if I care about the change.

I really want a local news paper that covers the above types of things. I can't find it and in turn I have no idea who to vote for. Town positions are partizan so I at least I know democrat/republican (for whatever that means...). I also know all candidates are married and have kids - and the family picture was taken by someone who knows how to make them look good. They all will "fight for me" as well, but never do they promise anything that might be controversial (unlike their opponent - they are obviously biased against their opponent and yet they are my best source of information about their opponent)

National news I will hear about and I can form opinions. However local it is much harder. The newspapers I have access to are not helping.

220hertz 17 hours ago

The unfortunate part is that while a lot of people might want that information, few will pay for it. I ran a small company's paywall, like this was a small chain of local papers. We could barely give the subscriptions away.

SoftTalker 16 hours ago

If you're lucky, you'll have a motivated local blogger who attends the meetings and posts reports. If you do, throw them a few bucks in whatever way they accept payments. The local paper used to send a reporter to do that but they only have a couple of actual reporters working now.

thesuitonym 17 hours ago

I used to feel that way, but I've come back around to finding it easier to read the news in the actual paper. For once, I'm not going to get distracted by a text or email notification. But more importantly, there's no cookie notification to dismiss, there's no autoplay video ad that somehow got around my pihole and ublock origin, there's no subscription nag flyout, and I don't have to log in every time despite clicking on "Remember me."

Plus, there's the visual cue to those around me that I'm not just idly scrolling, I'm actually looking at something.

tgv 18 hours ago

Yeah, it's really sad, but it's a nail in the coffin of democracy. And prosperity. The news papers here seem to be written for 30/40 yr old, middle class women with just enough spare time to feel guilty about other people's behavior.

iamacyborg 18 hours ago

I’m not sure the misogyny is warranted.

tgv 15 hours ago

It's not misogyny. They seem to be the target audience. It's also surprising you only comment on the gender.

iamacyborg 15 hours ago

I’m commenting on this, which is clearly misogynistic dreck.

> 30/40 yr old, middle class women with just enough spare time to feel guilty about other people's behavior

phtrivier 18 hours ago

I can't access the article, so I don't know which newspaper they were subscribed to. But, given the wording of "the leading national newspaper", I can assume it would be "Le Monde".

The audience for the written paper is not less-than-high-school educated. Do you think the wording is at this level ?

Eg: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2026/09/08/pisa-202...

Georgelemental 18 hours ago

In terms of the actual ideas being promulgated, Le Monde is approximately CP-level.

sam_lowry_ 17 hours ago

CP stands for child porn?

theokrueger 17 hours ago

hopefully 'college prep' or the like. so highschool-level (low bar)

iamacyborg 17 hours ago

Cours préparatoire

ArnoVW 17 hours ago

Classe Préparatoire. When you quit kindergarden and enter ‘real school’. Age 6

I guess it is meant as hyperbole, though I read NRC, Le Monde and NYT and can confirm that le Monde is the leading newspaper of France but it is not the newspaper it was. Mostly opinion and lifestyle, not a lot of investigative or even just in-depth journalism. Mostly preaching (some of it for causes I happen to agree with, but still)

phtrivier 14 hours ago

Yes, I suppose it's expected to accuse a newspaper of being not high minded enough, and use a childish level of tease. Anyway....

The investigative journalism is still there - they're usually on the same big international stories as the guardian or NYT (which, okay, I get it are not enough to the left to be considered serious in this thread, we get it. Meanwhile the vast majority of people think they're red bastion and watch hard right "news" tv channels and tiktok reals, but let's all pretend it's the same thing to continue feeling smug about ourselves.)

However, they're VERY bad at putting those "deep" article in the front page of the website. The "paper" paper does a better job - when a 10 lines articles sits next to a full pager, you get a sense of hierarchy.

When there is only the title on the front page, you don't get this.

Also, they have "live threads" for everything , and "alerts" for anything.

Georgelemental 16 hours ago

No, French equivalent of US 1st grade

Saline9515 18 hours ago

Le Monde is mainly entertainment/preachy articles nowadays. Content and writing is usually better in the "Le Monde Diplomatique", although it's more politically biased.

English version: https://mondediplo.com/

tstrimple 16 hours ago

To be politically "neutral" is to be biased.

phtrivier 14 hours ago

The front page of Le Monde tonight is about the PISA ranking, a profile of the Putin presidency, an interview about constitutional rights, and an article about Chinese red guards under communist china.

Seriously, you call that "entertainment" ?

As for calling them to be "preachy", that's another thing; but then presenting the Diplo as a counterpoint is weird, right ? ;) (there is hardly any major newspaper more preachy and self-righteous than them. But, I mean, I'm very glad they _exist_ as long as you don't require me to read it, that's fine.)

onlyrealcuzzo 18 hours ago

They've been dumbed down for a reason...

KellyCriterion 18 hours ago

In Germany, there was a survey around 2009/2010, depicting that more than 60% of the audience of the major national daily newsshow do not understand the words used by the moderators

(it was about "Tagesschau", a major news outlet by the public broadcasting system)

Terr_ 18 hours ago

> more than 60% of the audience of the major national daily newsshow do not understand the words used by the moderators

I don't want to deny a modern problem may exist based on additional signals, but this statistic isn't necessarily bad: News ought to be consistently exposing viewers to vocabulary they don't know.

Not just as a way to help people naturally grow their vocabulary by seeing it used in context, but also because the news should cover topics and specialties that are outside any individual's usual work and leisure.

bsoqk 17 hours ago

Maybe they should have used Arabic words.

xboxnolifes 18 hours ago

> I would estimate that many are now written to target a less-than-high-school literacy level.

I would have imagined they would have been targeting less than high school literacy since their inception. At least the ones intended to be read by the masses. I'd actually expect that they target somewhere in the 4th-6th grade literacy range.

thesuitonym 17 hours ago

It used to be a pretty well-known guideline that any writing for general consumption should be at no higher than an 8th grade level.

SoftTalker 16 hours ago

Well then I think 8th grade level must have been higher in the past than it is today.

My local paper (basically a reprint of Gannett stories with a few local ones, mostly sports) tends to use a very basic vocabulary, often organizes stories as a set of questions/answers, or bullet point lists under a "What you need to know about..." headline.

When I think back to newspapers I read in high school (1980s) or even in the 1990s they weren't written at that low a level.

bell-cot 18 hours ago

Back in the mid-1990's, I took training as a literacy tutor. Our instructor noted that region's major newspapers (Detroit, USA) were written to a 6th-grade reading level. Except for the sports section, which was more like 3rd grade level.

I will agree that the Attention Economy has replaced most of the traditional "news" with angry click-bait.

220hertz 17 hours ago

Your first point is true, unequivocally so. I watched it happen ... from inside the newsroom for almost two decades.

We were actually taught in journalism school to write straight-up news for a Grade 5 level audience. You could get fancy if you chose in opinion pieces.

To your second point, if it bleeds it leads. That's always been the case. Journalism is, and always has been, a business. A sensational news story of yesteryear is today's viral content. It's the same thing — both are desirable because they sell.

bityard 17 hours ago

Ha. Not knowing any better, I took a class in high school that turned out to be actually reading the daily newspaper and writing a one-page report _every single day_ about international issues that literally never impacted our day-to-day lives in rural Podunk, USA.

It was the most boring and soul-crushing class I've ever taken in my life. After that remote learning course about Quality Assurance in college, of course.

jll29 18 hours ago

In Europe, The Economist and The Guardian are about the only serious in-depth sources left, at least for those that can read English.

TheMatten 18 hours ago

That feels a little bit reductive, at least given that non-English news is precisely what big part of population is going to consume. There isn't even an unified market for news content given the language boundaries. Not to say there aren't many shallow, clickbait sources, but there're good ones as well.

bluGill 17 hours ago

The better educated somebody is, the more likely they are to have reasonably fluency in English. There are some great non-English sources out there, but English is the most read language by well educated people.

Not saying there are not great news content in other languages. However English should be expected to dominate over the whole world.

KPGv2 17 hours ago

This is a bizarre take. Newspapers, even really good ones, generally don't target international readers. They target their home country's readers. How many Englishmen are interested in the machinations of unions in Paris? How many Frenchmen?

Obviously the best coverage will be in the country's majority language.

bluGill 17 hours ago

The best coverage for a country will be in that countries language.

However for world events coverage English is the more likely language. For niches that might interest you English might be the only option since odds are someone in every country speaks English and reports on that niche. (odds, but no guarantee)

KPGv2 16 hours ago

> However for world events coverage English is the more likely language

Can you explain how you arrived at this conclusion?

Certainly when I lived in Japan and picked up a copy of the Yomiuri Shimbun, the world events coverage was in Japanese. And when I've traveled in France, Le Monde was entirely in French. The international section didn't become English.

> For niches that might interest you

I'm not sure you're talking about newspapers at this point.

iamacyborg 18 hours ago

The FT is solid.

cjs_ac 17 hours ago

I used to read the Grauniad, but I've become distrustful of it over the past few years because of how aggressively it panders to my sensibilities and biases. Also, it doesn't pursue any story more than any other broadsheet would; it's just a matter of what stories it chooses to pursue.

KPGv2 17 hours ago

Le Monde has an English edition. Die Welt has an English version, doesn't it? I'm only familiar with the German, but I could've sworn.

vinni2 14 hours ago

I remember in my school days each day one student was responsible for summarising headlines from the newspapers in the school assembly to encourage us to read newspapers.

throwitaway222 17 hours ago

We need more things like Ground news.

We're either propagandized by reading the news or watching it on TV OR we're holed up in a confirmation biased world by social media (which is also propagandized).

paulryanrogers 17 hours ago

Don't look too closely into Ground News. It's more like controlled opposition

wsloth514 18 hours ago

'Local newspapers' in my area are majority advertisement for local businesses or coupons. Like the content of reading a newspaper could be condensed to maybe 2 pages, if that. The first page is like what volunteers or schools are doing. While another half a page contains maybe a township schedule or something similar. I don't think there is much content to 'read' that would change much to be honest.

bluGill 18 hours ago

news papers have always been 80% ads. However they used to have a lot more content (and a lot more ads)

econ 17 hours ago

At work I have access to all newspapers big and small, I use to read all of them but I haven't touched one in a decade. Not one article that isn't infantile nonsense or outright propaganda of a quality that falls appart in the first sentence.

KPGv2 17 hours ago

The fact you can't find a quality newspaper to read says more about you than the state of journalism.

The Guardian, AP, Reuters, NPR, etc. Hell, the New York Review of Books is crazy good, although their world news coverage usually is slipped into book reviews.

BrandoElFollito 16 hours ago

Since I cannot find any mention of this in the French press and after asking a few friends who have children in high school (hopefully this is lycée, a tad too late to push people to reding) -- it is very likely not a nationwide experiment at all

BrandoElFollito 16 hours ago

A friend of mine briefly managed a "celebrities and ovni" kind of newspaper. His first decision was to distribute papers to generic people asking them to highlight the words they did not understand. He then proceeded to having these words added to the spellcheckers so that they are flagged as incorrect.

His time was a nice success for the newspaper and a sad addition to the average stupidity of the world.

dfxm12 18 hours ago

I used to get the newspaper everyday before highschool. I mostly got it for sports, comics and puzzles, but many days I ended up reading it cover to cover. Unfortunately, that paper folded while I was in college. Hopefully, this is a good program for highschoolers and newspapers both...

newspaper1 18 hours ago

How about making teenagers seek out independent media? We've seen the results of people being raised reading MSM newspapers and it's not pretty. Propaganda packaged as "serious news", is some of the most dangerous media that exists.

cjs_ac 17 hours ago

> Finally, we show that both free news access and media education improve media literacy skills (+0.08 to 0.26 sd), with larger effects among students taught by teachers with prior experience in media education.

They taught the teenagers how to question and interrogate the claims presented in the newspapers, which is far more effective than blindly branding 'MSM newspapers' as propaganda. (The study was conducted in France; are you sure that conventional French newspapers are propaganda of any inclination?)

Blikkentrekker 18 hours ago

I don't understand. The way I read the text one group was simply given a free subscription no? They weren't made to read anything?

eightysixfour 18 hours ago

Free subscription + a media education module for their teachers. Without making them read it, they showed high usage of the free subscription.

Blikkentrekker 18 hours ago

Yeah, I got that from the abstract too. I just don't understand where the “making teenagers read newspapers” angle comes from.

neehao 18 hours ago

good point about the title.

jelly 18 hours ago

There's a more subtle form of 'make' where you set conditions to induce a result. The fact is, giving anything away for free will increase its consumption.

Blikkentrekker 7 hours ago

Yes it will. But that doesn't mean that “making students read” doesn't arouse a very different impression. “Making students do homework.” does not imply “Making it free for them to do it.”.

jmspamerton 18 hours ago

Again, what does this have to do with hacker news. This isn't reddit.

thesuitonym 17 hours ago

From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> What to Submit

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

delichon 18 hours ago

"A Nationwide Experiment in Mainstream Media Indoctrination in French High Schools"

Fixed it for you.

neehao 18 hours ago

are kids so easy to indoctrinate? i suppose tiktok self-indoctrination is fine ...

altcognito 18 hours ago

You would think that any sort of reading was immediate indoctrination with comments like these.

newspaper1 18 hours ago

Reading MSM newspapers is definitely indoctrination. With Europeans getting more and more hawkish on Russia (and other things), this seems like a great way to get everyone thinking "right".

thesuitonym 17 hours ago

Newspapers are mainstream again?