# S9 Ep41: Making teenagers read newspapers

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/voxtalks-economics-504930/s9-ep41-making-teenagers-read-newspapers
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/voxtalks-economics-504930/s9-ep41-making-teenagers-read-newspapers.md
Podcast: [VoxTalks Economics](https://stenobird.com/podcast/voxtalks-economics-504930)
Published: 2026-07-17T10:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://audioboom.com/posts/8929290
Audio file: https://audioboom.com/posts/8929290.mp3?modified=1784272332&sid=4966228&source=rss
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/voxtalks-economics-504930/episodes/s9-ep41-making-teenagers-read-newspapers
Duration seconds: 1229

## Resource

French teenagers carry a smartphone with access to almost anything, but few of them have been using it to read the news. Julia Cagé (Sciences Po, CEPR) ran an experiment to test the one barrier everyone assumes matters most: the price of a newspaper. She and her co-authors gave free digital subscriptions to Le Monde and media education to thousands of French high school students for a year, and then tracked what the students actually read. It's a bit like persuading kids to eat vegetables when there are fries on the table, she tells Tim Phillips. Can a free subscription persuade France's teens to use their phones differently and eat their media greens, and what changes when they do? The research behind this episode: Briole, Simon, Julia Cagé, and Andrea Prat. 2026. "Making Teenagers Read Newspapers: A Nationwide Experiment in French High Schools." CEPR Discussion Paper 21706. Gated. To cite this episode: Phillips, Tim, and Julia Cagé. 2026. “Making teenagers read newspapers”. VoxTalks Economics (podcast). About the guest Julia Cagé is Professor of Economics at Sciences Po Paris and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), where she leads the CEPR Research and Policy Network on Media Plurality. Her research spans media economics, political participation, and the economics of information, with a particular focus on how news markets shape political knowledge and democratic engagement. She is the author of several books on the media, including Saving the Media and The Price of Democracy . Research cited in this episode Reuters Institute Digital News Report is an annual global survey that tracks how people find, consume, and pay for news across dozens of countries. Cagé cites its long-running data on declining time spent reading news online, a tr…

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## Transcript

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