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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?
