Heading up the next news evolution: Pierre Caulliez on Gen Z integration

The road to any consultancy is typically a long, arduous one. But in this accelerated, revolutionary, digi-tech AI age, it's not surprising to learn that at only 23, Pierre Caulliez has already spent a decade navigating every winding curve and intersection of news and digital content creation.

As head of Yoof - a Gen Z media, culture and communication strategy studio- he's also amassed a wealth of knowledge in online interaction; from building community, to understanding how Gen Z interacts with news.

Caulliez was only 13 when he first developed his own Facebook and YouTube channels, with cooking and baking clips that garnered over 120,000 followers - and propelled the young influencer into the professional world of marketing, branding and community building.

"That was my first real experience and that really gave me a first path in the content creator space," he recalls. "I learned a lot about how to engage people on social media and how to create attractive content in the best kind of formats."

Bridging the generational news gap

His shift to news came five years later, with the arrival of COVID, when his peers' response to the pandemic alerted him to the widening gap between young people and news media.

"I was reading about COVID around the world and listening to my friends who weren't really caring at all about this thing that was impacting their lives, or what was going on in the news. I felt there was something I could do about it."

In March 2020, Caulliez launched ForTeeNewson Instagram and TikTok, aimed at providing teenagers with daily news updates.

To widen his reach, he approached schools around the world, asking students to share their contributions. The result is a boost for global digital media literacy: not only did the daily carousel feature subscribers from around the world: "Teachers also used the channel as a topic of their English class," reveals Caulliez.

The initiative gave deep insights into the development and sustainability challenges facing news startups. "I had a really great time doing this; it was also a very busy time because we were a very small team with obviously no resources, no funding, but producing a huge amount of content for an international audience."

The teenage news site was selected for a six-month news media accelerator program run by German press agency NMA- setting Caulliez firmly on his career path.

"The accelerator programme allowed us to test plenty of different things for ForTeeNews- but it was also the time where I started to meet a lot of traditional news outlets - and that's when I switched to the other side."

Encouraging collaborative consultations

Caulliez was advised to share his expertise with these media outlets - and Yoof was born.

The consultancy has worked with traditional and independent media brands, as well as regional French and German publishers, helping them better understand their audience.

"I'm a true believer that news is really important for democracy, for people to understand the world, for people to be able to become better citizens.

"And I'm a bit afraid, to be honest, when I look out around me - because I'm 23 and I'm surrounded by other young people - and I just see that news is not important to them."

This set Caulliez on a mission to bring the two worlds together - and he has strong views on how that can happen.

"I think it's extremely important that news outlets make the effort to make news relevant for them; that they evolve with Gen Z, not just attract them- it's not for young people to go to news, but for news to go to young people," he notes.

Adopting agility for news' next evolution

There are two elements to this evolution, explains Caulliez. "First is to understand the users better: I think editors should really bring young people in, and discuss with them what they're reading; what they care about, and what is interesting to them, to really adapt their approach to these young people."

The second element lies in being agile enough to not just follow, but also adopt and integrate audience trends and developments.

"That's something I've been really pushing in my work: getting content creators to the table, listening to what they say, with them, and also helping them because these new independent news outlets and creators are doing great jobs, but often do not have the resources or structure of some traditional outlets."

Caulliez, a French native based in London, is a global citizen, according to his LinkedIn profile: "I grew up across six countries, have visited 41, and I've always been curious about how people connect with culture - what they notice, what they trust, and how it all shapes their world."

This week, he is at our Asian Media Leaders Summit in Singapore, conducting his first workshop for the News Creator Exchange (NCX), a core pillar of WAN-IFRA's new Future Audiences Initiative - a project he is deeply passionate about.

"I think collaborations between newsrooms and creators so far has been very transactional, and I think there is space to bring them to the table. NCX is about trying to get away from the transactional approach.

"The most meaningful collaboration is to collaborate together; sit down together, around the same table and discuss what we could do together, how crazily creative we could get. I see these two worlds can really learn and leverage each other - and this space is to enable that.

'This peer learning is a key pillar, focused on mutual learning, mutual understanding, mutual exchange.'

Lucinda Jordaan

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