---
title: Find a new crew
description: News media should give young talent new agency
---

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# Find a new crew

[Alan Hunter](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/media-hunter/author/alan-hunter)  14 November 2025

 5 min read

**News media should give young talent new agency**

The difficulty of transforming a business has often been framed as akin to rebuilding a plane while it is in flight. It’s a useful metaphor because it captures the necessity of keeping the business running at the same time as finding a new path.

In the news industry, however, I feel that we need to update it. Not only are we rebuilding the plane while it is in flight … but we are also changing it into a helicopter.

The challenges keep multiplying. With every day it feels more likely that technological advances and user habits will require a fundamental rethink of how we provide the news. Our rebuilt news plane will likely not be bigger, faster and carry more passengers, instead it’ll be smaller, more nimble and perhaps even have a different purpose.

Of course, the pilots of planes can’t automatically fly helicopters, so that analogy works too. News organisations need new leaders. It’s something that Dimitry Shiskin raised a few weeks ago and, as regular readers know, I agree with him and the need for the industry to welcome a broader range of (non-journalistic) skills.

This is something I thought about again this week for two reasons. First, I read the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s [summary of its work on the BBC](https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/bbc-under-scrutiny-heres-what-research-tells-about-its-role-uk), which has been making as well as reporting the news this week.

The message of this research was not that the BBC is biased, not trusted or an institution in decline – quite the opposite: despite what its ideological opponents and business rivals would have you believe, it showed that the BBC outranks all its domestic competitors in all these areas.

Instead, what stood out was that the BBC’s real shortcoming as a publicly funded broadcaster was that it was not reaching less affluent and younger demographics.

This led to my second thought-provoking moment. I was talking to an old friend who I bumped into on the way to work. He has had a long and successful career in newspapers but agreed that his organisation was also wrestling with how to attract new and younger readers. He said they were trying to tap youthful talent to revolutionise their social media and, especially, vertical video output.

“The problem is,” he said, “you don’t just want to hand it over to a bunch of 22-year-olds.”

I mumbled my agreement, but afterwards, and reflecting on the BBC’s real issues, I thought, why not? Why aren’t news media companies giving young journalists the keys to the, er, helicopter? What is stopping them taking a little risk and utilising the skills that are powering the growth in influencers and creators?

It’s not like they are having tremendous success at the moment. And every study I’ve seen has suggested that the No 1 way to attract young readers, viewers and listeners is to put young writers and presenters in front of them. (Amedia in Norway even found that focusing on a youth angle for stories attracted more older readers too.)

It is a stretch for many established leaders –who will worry about being “shown up” for their lack of knowledge, or that the “inexperience” of the new talent will cause issues. But in my experience it can equally be liberating to admit that you know less than someone junior to you and give them agency. I once led a whole team who, when I took the job, knew more than me.

So it’s time to accept that we have a new kind of aircraft that means we’ll need a new kind of crew too.

## Next blog post

<https://www.hbmadvisory.com/media-hunter/the-wrong-values>

## [The wrong values](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/media-hunter/the-wrong-values)

[Read more](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/media-hunter/the-wrong-values)

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