Making Teenagers Read Newspapers. A Nationwide Experiment in French High Schools

Simon Briole, Julia Cage and Andrea Prat

No 21706, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Despite unprecedented access to information in the digital age, young citizens face growing challenges related to news consumption and misinformation. This large-scale randomized controlled trial examines the impact of two complementary interventions designed to foster media literacy and the consumption of high-quality news among high-school students, implemented in France over the 2024-25 academic year. The study involves 243 high schools (for a total number of 9,628 students), randomly assigned to a control group or to receive one or both of the following interventions: (i) a one-year free digital subscription to the leading national newspaper, and (ii) media education modules implemented by teachers. Exploiting unique data on students' actual online news consumption, we document a very large uptake of the free subscription, which translates into persistent and large increases in news consumption (+0.49 to 0.60 sd) and demand for future news, including an 8pp increase in paid subscriptions nearly a year after the intervention. We also observe a 0.20 to 0.31 sd increase in news knowledge for students enrolled in deprived schools, reducing baseline information inequality by 45-70%. Finally, we show that both free news access and media education improve media literacy skills (+0.08 to 0.26 sd), with larger effects among students taught by teachers with prior experience in media education.

JEL-codes: D8 D83 D91 L82 L86 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-07
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP21706 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:21706

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP21706

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().