Credit: By Steve Snodgrass on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
To engage younger audiences newsrooms need to offer more "relevant and meaningful" stories targeted around users' interests and behaviours, Naja Nielsen, head of TV and social media at DR News, told delegates at the News Xchange conference today.
"It's interesting to see in the media business, our journalism, our news shows, for instance, [are] maybe not in a way that fits people born after 1980... people that are native in the digital age," she said.
People in their twenties were more likely to "live with their phone [by] their side," Nielsen said.
"They communicate, they are connected to the internet and to their friends and connections day and night, all the time."
DR News has a large and well-established audience, although Nielsen noted that changes in viewing habits, with more people reading or watching news online, meant it was unclear what the next five years would hold.
The majority of the outlet's current viewers fall into the over-40 age group, she said, adding that "a lot of them have very strong habits" and tend to come directly to DR, whether on television or online.
By contrast, younger audiences in general are more likely to consume news which "comes to them", she said.
This might be in the form of recommendations from friends on social media platforms, or a personalised push notification from a news app.
In terms of audience metrics, DR's late news show, screened at 9.30pm, received 620,000 viewers on Monday night (10 November), and Nielsen added that it regularly attracts more.
"It is a big share, that's 30 per cent of everybody watching television at that time, so that programme is successful in the TV world," she said.
"But if you look closer into this 620,000 [viewers], only 20,000 of them were between 20 and 40 years old." In Denmark there are 700,000 people in this age group, Nielsen added.
"So out of 700,000 people only 20,000 chose to spend their half hour with us." This is less than three per cent of the 20 to 40 age group.
In order for news outlets to grow the proportion of their audience which falls within this demographic, Nielsen said: "You have to be relevant, meaningful... in the context of where they watch and engage. I think we have to look at how people live their lives."
With people living increasingly busy lives, Nielsen also noted it was important to present news in a way which feels "immediately personal" to a user, whether they have "two minutes or 10 minutes or 15 minutes" to spend reading or watching news.
Good user experience also plays a key role in this sense of immediacy, particularly on mobile. Nielsen added that users accessing news on the internet tend to be "very impatient".
"If things don't work or happen [with] the least friction," she said, "then people just go on to something else."
- Tickets for Journalism.co.uk's next news:rewired conference on February 3, 2015, are now on sale. For more details visit news:rewired.com.
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