Spilnews, Mediahuis’ youth brand, is breaking the mould of traditional journalism. It’s a radical strategy that is proving hugely popular with 18-24 year olds. Here’s why it works.
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Mediahuis’ Head of Future Audiences, Liesbeth Nizet, has arguably one of the most closely watched roles in European publishing. Tasked with attracting new, younger subscribers and building products that feel relevant to them, she is reshaping long-held assumptions about what journalism should look like, and how it should be measured. But above all else her starting point is quite simply age.
“Our average subscriber age is over 60. The real risk isn’t our current audience, it’s that we optimise so strongly for them that we fail to build relevance with the next generation.”
It’s already clear that the days of chasing big numbers of clicks, pageviews, are irrelevant to modern media in which the issue is getting audiences to visit news outlets at all. What matters now is going beyond engagement and creating a sense of belonging, whereby audiences identify with the publication, and naturally spend time with it.
“If you look at Gen Z, there is this sense of belonging, but also this sense of being inspired, being excited,” she explains. “Their support is never automatic, it’s earned. Young audiences continuously reassess whether a brand still deserves their time and trust.”
Belonging is a feeling that resists being reduced to simple metrics. It is expressed in participation, forwarding, commenting, and in the willingness of young users to shape the coverage itself. For an idea of what that looks like, take a look at Spilnews, the youth-focused brand she oversees, where community interaction is a design principle rather than an afterthought.
“We deliberately design for community. We look beyond followers and reach, and pay close attention to comments, shares, and the topics young people actively bring into the conversation.”
Human moderation over algorithmic scale
Community building comes with a cost: time. When publishers talk about time-consuming tasks AI always pops into the conversation, but Nizet is very clear about how to handle the labour-intensive work of monitoring conversations:
“For Spilnews, success isn’t about volume, it’s about quality and the community around it. I’d rather have a journalist actively engaging with comments and turning them into new stories than producing more content. The moment you fully automate that interaction, you lose the human signal that creates belonging.” Instead, journalists at Spilnews not only follow conversations closely, but turn comments into new stories. When viewers questioned a video on sustainable denim—“Okay, but which brands should I buy then?” The team immediately created a follow-up explainer based on how fashion sustainability is measured. This responsiveness is one of the reasons why, only a few months since launch, 80% of Spil’s users are aged between 18 and 24.
A newsroom built for youth, not retro-fitted
To achieve that Mediahuis took the bold step of creating a full separate youth newsroom staffed largely by under-25s. As Nizet explains; “That’s exactly why we built a separate brand. We believe youth-driven journalism is best created by young journalists themselves, and we didn’t want legacy routines that serve mostly a different audience to dilute that perspective.”
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