Ned Cabot, a business lecturer at George Mason University in Virginia, has a clear goal for his students: “They should at least make an effort to create a habit of consuming quality news.”
Like many academics across the globe, Cabot is grappling with the increasing difficulty of encouraging young people to read, analyse, and interpret information—whether for study, leisure, or broad knowledge. This poses real questions about preparing future managers and citizens.
“In some cases, they know very little and possess very few facts,” explains Cabot, who teaches at the Costello College of Business. “In other cases, they possess some facts but don’t know how they know them or where they got the information. The result is that it’s very difficult to evaluate and put them into context.”
Concerns about the decline of reading are not new. From the rise of radio and television to the spread of electronic books, society has worried about changing habits. However, today, smartphones, social media, and artificial intelligence have significantly escalated the issue for current students and the generations they will influence.
Lauren McClanahan, who trains future secondary school teachers at Western Washington University, recalls: “Last term, a student approached me and said, ‘I don’t read’. Almost all my students have little tolerance for reading long-form text. They have reduced attention spans. As teacher educators, we feel in constant competition with all these outside forces.”
Scholars points out to multiple causes, including distraction, anxiety, information overload, distrust of sources, and the often-dense style of academic writing.
The impact is clear—distrust in information, “news avoidance,” the rise of echo chambers, and even the outsourcing of critical thought to technology. One striking shift is the decline in mainstream news readership.
The 2025 Reuters Institute Digital News Report highlights “an accelerating shift towards consumption via social media and video platforms diminishing the influence of ‘institutional journalism’ and supercharging a fragmented alternative media environment.
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” Yet Renee Hobbs, professor of communication studies at the University of Rhode Island, insists: “Traditional journalism is something we have to hold on to. While journalistic objectivity is a myth, its practices have served us very well for the past 300 years: independence, neither fear nor favour, introducing complexity, and helping readers understand. It’s more important than ever.”
For many business and economics educators, engagement with credible journalism is non-negotiable. Marginal Revolution University in the US, for example, makes current media content central to its online economics resources.
At Columbia University, business executive and part-time lecturer Celia Kapsomera has written that reading and discussing current events “allows students to see how interconnected risks are today, keeps the classroom content fresh and relevant, [and is also] a practical tool to enhance critical thinking.”
Robert Daly, who leads student engagement at Fordham University’s Gabelli School of Business, stresses that students “need to be aware of the business environment to give them a window of understanding of what’s impacting the marketplace, and what their future employers are immersed in.” He asks students to present articles weekly, sharpening both presentation and critical analysis.
“They need to understand the broader context of what’s happening in the world from a business perspective to be on top of news in interviews and not have their heads in the sand,” he adds. “They need to see how to write for business because their boss, client or peer needs very quick access to what is happening, [whether they should] care and how to make quick judgments about it.”
Other teaching methods include “lateral reading” to assess the credibility of sources before thoroughly reading them, deploying fact-checking and media bias tools, and hands-on journalism to understand the news production process. Shouvik Banerjee, founder of AverPoint—an online platform partnered with the Financial Times—says: “Students have the freedom to read whatever they want and should not accept news as gospel. But the antidote to media bias is not the algorithmic destruction of news. You need tools to critique it.” He draws on the scholarship of James Potter, professor of media literacy at UC Santa Barbara, who promotes “close reading” and encourages students to question, review, and substantiate claims as part of evidence-based writing.
Potter himself warns about distractions that obstruct deeper learning. He argues: “People want to feel they are informed but don’t really want to work at it. There is no quick fix. We need an educational system that, from kindergarten, presents a higher degree of challenge to develop the skills of analysis, evaluation, classification, extraction, and synthesis. You have to develop those through hard work.”
By Joseph Mambili
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