(Image: Mitchell Squire/Private Media)

It was always going to be a Sisyphean task when the most conservative newspaper in the country launched a site hoping to capture a younger audience. And five months into The Australian’s youth title The Oz, the venture does seem ill-fated.

The publication has found middling engagement on social media but more significantly it is yet to reckon with the political and cultural chasm between The Australian‘s core audience and the readers it hopes to capture.

The national broadsheet has never been a publication for young people. Open the pages of The Australian and you’ll learn millennials are dour and anxious, they berate the old and the frail and they couldn’t possibly fathom the coronavirus outbreak because they have been protected from all risk and hardship and don’t have the attention span to listen to politicians. Not to mention the disdain the paper has shown for literal children — whether it is Greta Thunberg or LGBTQIA+ kids who were the subject of their feral media coverage during the paper’s relentless campaign against a federally funded program launched to support them.

It would be too easy to lazily link to the paper’s many opinion columns insulting anyone under the age of 40, just as we could gather examples from youth media that group all baby boomers as rich, self-interested buffoons who take blurry photos on their iPads. (Many boomers are poor, some are working in the interests of others, and we’re sure a few take blurry photos on their iPhones.) But really it isn’t about individual columnists — it comes down to editorial priorities, and The Australian’s priorities have historically been completely at odds with what most people care about.

Investors, landlords and homeowners over renters. Employers over workers. Infinite growth over sustainability. Division over inclusivity. The relentless promotion of fossil fuels over the documentation of the effects of climate change. The venom directed at those in academia and the arts. The disdain for industrial action and climate protests. The failure to include diverse voices. The sexism or, at best, the indulgence of a kind of neoliberal corporate feminism serving puff pieces about women venture capitalists or mining girl bosses. 

The cultural chasm 

The younger you go, the more out of step the paper is. Millennials and to a greater degree gen Z are more likely to believe in many of the topics The Australian has spent a decade actively campaigning against: action on climate change, tackling racial injustice, gender fluidity.

In Australia, surveys find the majority of gen Z agree teens should be allowed to openly express any sexual or gender orientation and disagree that school isn’t the place to learn about LGBTQIA+ people. During the same-sex marriage debate, eight of the daily metropolitan and national newspapers published editorials after the postal survey was announced explicitly in favour of a “yes” response in the ballot. The Australian was the only newspaper to editorialise that it could not “endorse such a proposal sight unseen”.

A study released last year found News Corp publications included more about transgender people than any other Australian publisher, and up to 90% of its articles framed the issue in a negative way. The Australian’s war against transgender youth ended with the Press Council finding it broke media guidelines in its coverage of the head of a high-profile children’s gender clinic, publishing incorrect information, failing to ensure fairness and causing substantial distress. 

Apart from The Australian Financial Review, The Australian is one of the most pro-business titles in the country, often commissioning fawning coverage of companies with even the vaguest social mission. Most Australian millennials and gen Zs agreed that businesses have no ambition beyond wanting to make money.

Most have adhered to their government’s public health guidelines either fairly or very seriously throughout the pandemic, a recent survey found, but The Oz seems to have stuck to its dad’s lockdown-sceptic party line. 

The unavoidable political and ideological divide 

The cultural inconsistencies unsurprisingly show up in blatant electoral differences between The Australian’s existing readership and that The Oz might want to attract. AEC enrolment data showed seats with four of the top five highest proportions of voters aged 18-29 went to the Greens in the recent federal election.

When you look at the outcomes in the top 10 electorates with the highest percentage of voters under 30, it is overwhelmingly green and red, with a sliver of blue. Young people used their vote to vote for politicians who News Corp papers have derided. Just once in the lifetimes of even the oldest millennials has The Australian endorsed a Labor prime ministerial candidate — Kevin Rudd in 2007 — and the editor later said it was a mistake. 

Even in the midst of a pandemic, a recently released Deloitte report found climate change stands out as Australian millennials’ (33%) and gen Zs’ (33%) primary concern, as it does for gen Zs globally (26%). The Australian’s climate denialism is well documented. In 2013 the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism found climate denialist views in a third of the nation’s media coverage of climate change with News Corp the main culprit. The stats on The Australian’s coverage are damning.

On Friday, The Australian’s environment editor Graham Lloyd, whose work has been the subject of Media Watch episodes and Press Council complaints, published a story about an Italian study reassuring readers there was no climate emergency.

The day after Rupert Murdoch claimed there were “no climate deniers” around his company, The Australian published an op-ed from geologist Ian Plimer claiming the idea that human emissions of carbon dioxide had driven global warming had “never been shown”, resulting in an Australian Press Council breach. 

The cucumber is super  

So how is The Oz differentiating itself?

Its editor, Elyse Popplewell, has said it inherited “the genes of rigorous journalism” from its parent paper. “But we get to package it up in an entirely new way — we get to address new audiences in a way that The Australian perhaps wouldn’t,” she said.

The site seems yet to dedicate serious resources or beat reporters to issues that affect young people. Instead, as its editor says, it is preoccupied with how it addresses the audience rather than what it provides it. The publication filters news through a kind of 2010s internet speak in which celebrity culture gets unceremoniously smooshed in with the breaking news cycle. 

As Benjamin Clark writes: “The implicit assumptions behind this writing style reflect a tired stereotype of young people — that we don’t care about societal issues, particularly politics, and can only be cajoled into such terrain through frivolity, irony and distraction.”

The result is a figure like John Howard — treated seriously in the pages of the national broadsheet — becomes a former prime minister with “killer eyebrows” who had a “front row seat” to events such as “9/11, the Port Arthur massacre and the Tampa boat affair”. That’s one way of putting it.

The Oz‘s style is at times incomprehensible, even to its neighbours at Holt Street. When news.com.au’s political editor tried in earnest to comprehend a tweet by The Oz’s editorial director comparing Kendall Jenner cutting a cucumber with discourse around superannuation, she responded by trying to explain: “The cucumber is super.”

The mix of soft and serious is to be expected in a youth media environment, and journalists — your authors included — are punishing. They are boring and too often prioritise self-seriousness and needless complexity over accessibility and levity. But The Australian has spent years patronising, insulting or ignoring the priorities of young people without seriously trying to cater to them or expecting them to pay. The new venture asks younger readers to pay for content that might indulge some of their interests but continues to condescend them.

An already tough market 

Youth print media is hard to get into and easy to get kicked out of, particularly for outlets attempting anything close to news. BuzzFeed News’ local arm was cut in the pandemic, Junkee has lost key staff, publications that have captured young women in overseas markets, like Refinery 29, struggle to do so here.

Newcomer The Daily Aus has grown beyond its original offering of printing other people’s journalism on coloured Instagram tiles but it is too soon to judge its viability. Just like Pedestrian and Vice, which are both owned by Nine, The Oz has the benefit of being hooked into an existing media behemoth. Indeed, most of The Oz’s engagement seems to be coming from its parent paper’s accounts. 

The Oz’s most engaging articles on social media were primarily popular on Facebook (with Reddit being the other major source of engagement). The primary source of this engagement was The Australian’s Facebook page which crossposted The Oz‘s content to its 1.04 million followers. By comparison, The Oz’s page has an anaemic 190 followers.

TikTok is the social media platform where The Oz has grown its biggest audience, with 33,000 followers on its account. The secret to its success? Posting viral clips of celebrities and royalty rather than videos of original reporting from its team of journalists. Essentially, the content that’s most popular really has nothing to do with its original reporting. It’s indistinguishable from the news.com.au or Yahoo Australia TikTok accounts.

Which gets to the crux of the problem: The Oz has been given a mission to muscle into Australia’s youth media market and has been given the resources to do with a rigour that others can’t afford. There’s a gap, too. Youth media leans left but not all young people neatly fit into the Junkee or Vice audiences. Yet the institutional backing that gives The Oz these advantages also appears to have hamstrung it. 

The Australian is defined by its cast of conservative columnists who opine about things older readers love (or more often hate) most. Unlike its parent, and indeed unlike most youth media, The Oz is yet to run regular opinion columns that would give young people the same opportunity to debate the issues affecting them.

When the title first launched someone joked that it would cater to “kids who wear bow ties and use a wheelie bag at school”. Sky News is now trying to tap into the youth market by bringing onboard a young, female TikToker with Diet Rita Panahi vibes to run their account.

But The Australian doesn’t need to chase a minuscule cohort of younger home and business-owning, Coalition-voting, ABC-hating, pro-arts-defunding, climate-indifferent, free market lovers. It just needs to find some people, ideally amnesiacs, who will allow a direct debit to have their news translated into a girl boss lexicon and packaged in a nicer palette.

A 2021 report from New York’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism had a simple message for outlets trying to attract younger audiences: “Respect your target audience and understand the different aspects of what it means to be a young person consuming content today.” Too easy.

Disclosure: Gina Rushton worked as a journalist at The Australian from 2013 to 2016.

Does The Oz patronise millennials and gen Zs? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.