Letter: The relationship between the news and civic engagement

Letter to the editor

Where do young people learn about community issues and public affairs? Do they rely on social media as their primary information and news source? Adults and parents often tell their children to get involved in their communities and neighborhoods, signing them up for volunteer opportunities at nonprofit and voluntary organizations. But before they can become active citizens, it is important that they know what is actually happening around them.

While organizing donation drives for the Bread of the Mighty, a local food bank, and GRACE Marketplace, a homeless shelter in Gainesville, I have always wondered why some people are more willing to donate items or give up their time to volunteer. In contrast, I also wondered why some people are not so willing. My curiosity led to research on nonprofit civic participation: why people engage with nonprofit and voluntary organizations. My recent research with a faculty member at the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications made me think differently about where civic knowledge originates from: the news.

The findings do not necessarily mean that reading a single news story will automatically transform someone into a volunteer or donor. Rather, reading news can provide the kind of information necessary for citizens and community members to engage in a much longer civic process: learning about community issues; discussing them with family members, co-workers, friends, and classmates; developing trust; and eventually deciding to act on their own within their respective neighborhoods and communities.

This study was not designed specifically to test how middle- or high-schoolers consume news. But it raises an important question for schools, libraries, youth nonprofit organizations, and local governments: if news can be part of a pathway to civic participation among adults, could our schools and community organizations actually help young people develop this pathway much earlier? News matters not only for literacy, but also as a civic driver of youth civic participation.

A proposal could be that schools consider incorporating and improving news literacy and community news consumption. This could be done through the encouragement and support of newspapers, radio stations, television, websites, and social media, which can all be incorporated into the classroom settings. They can assign students to follow one specific community issue over several weeks; compare different news sources and outlets; discuss local government decisions; identify problems reported by community members; and connect news stories to civic institutions.

The usage of social media has been continuously posed as a serious concern by many adults. However, these platforms, such as TikTok or Instagram, should not be so quickly and automatically dismissed as civic spaces. With the digitalization of many news outlets, these are often the places where young people first encounter information about public affairs. But encountering a short video or reel should be a starting point, not necessarily the end point. Students should be encouraged to move from a post to the actual underlying news story, source, data, or even public record. 

A student who reads about housing, transportation, food insecurity, public safety, or environmental issues is more likely to recognize those same issues when they appear in their own neighborhood or community. The Youth Civic Liaison Project (YCLP) (read the previous column, (Why Gainesville and Alachua County need a collaborative civic engagement technology tool) currently asks students to observe their neighborhoods, identify problems, report them through myGNV, and communicate with local governments. News consumption could become the first step in that pipeline.

Civic engagement does not have to start when a student signs up to volunteer. It can begin much earlier –- when a young person reads about a problem, talks about it with others, poses a question, and begins to see that the problem belongs to their community. 

If we want young people to become active citizens, perhaps one of the simplest places to start is by helping them become informed citizens.

Read the news. Know your community. Then do something about it.

Justice Nah, Senior at Eastside High School

Justice Nah, a senior at Eastside High School, Gainesville, Florida, is the Founder and Director of YouCAN (Youth Civic Action Network: www.youcanproject.org) and has served as a volunteer juror, attorney, and clerk in Teen Court programs in Eugene, Oregon, and Gainesville, Florida for six years. Through extensive volunteer service, he has led donation drives collecting significant amounts of clothing, shoes, and household items for homeless shelters, as well as large quantities of food for local food banks. He is passionate about juvenile justice, youth civic engagement, and public policy.

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