Trend Story: Students no longer read newspapers
The HEADLINE: Young Adults Are Giving Newspapers Scant Notice
With the United States military fighting a protracted war in Iraq and a wide-open presidential campaign already making headlines daily, Americans of all ages are interested in current affairs and are consuming news like never before, right?
Not so, especially not teenagers and young adults, according to a report released last week by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
In fact, most teenagers and adults 30 and younger are not following the news closely at all, the report, titled ''Young People and News,'' concluded. It is based on a national sample of 1,800 Americans that included teenagers, young adults aged 18 to 30 and older adults.
Thomas Patterson, a professor of government and the press at Harvard who conducted the survey, said that young people today do not make an appointment with news every day the way older adults do.
''We found that most young adults don't have an ingrained news habit,'' he said. ''Most children today, when watching television, are not watching the same TV set that their parents are watching. So even if their parents are watching the news every day, the children are likely to be in another room watching something else and aren't acquiring the news habit.''
The survey went a step further to see what the respondents meant when they said that they did pay attention to the news. Those results, especially among the younger groups, were equally discouraging for the news industry, said Alex S. Jones, the director of the Shorenstein Center.
''What we found is that what people mean when they say they are engaged in the news has much more of a glancing, superficial basis than anything we would have hoped,'' he said. ''Young people seemed to think that just listening to the radio in the background was listening to the news.''
The results were especially grim for newspapers. Only 16 percent of the young adults surveyed aged 18 to 30 said that they read a newspaper every day and 9 percent of teenagers said that they did. That compared with 35 percent of adults over 30. Furthermore, despite the popular belief that young people are flocking to the Internet, the survey found that teenagers and young adults were twice as likely to get daily news from television than from the Web.
Despite this, some in the industry say the situation is not hopeless.
Jane Hirt, the editor of RedEye, a free daily newspaper that is published by The Chicago Tribune specifically for young, urban professionals, said that her publication had succeeded and had even expanded its audience by adopting some of the lessons learned from television and the Internet and by experimenting with ways to tell stories.
''We may have a short face-off with two sides of an issue,'' she said. ''We believe it is a way of delivering content in a form like younger people are used to getting on the Internet.''
She said that she reminds her editors that their younger readers are used to customizing their lives. ''They pick and choose what they want on their iPods, what to TiVo and watch whenever they want, and so forth,'' she said. ''Therefore, because we are targeting that niche audience, we make story selections to really connect with them, and we can do that because we are thinking about them all day.''
Still, her publication and newspapers in general may be facing an uphill battle.
''My sense is that newspapers in their traditional form are not going to be able to recapture this audience,'' said Professor Patterson. ''What's happened over time is that we have become more of a viewing nation than a reading nation, and the Internet is a little of both. My sense is that, like it or not, the future of news is going to be in the electronic media, but we don't really know what that form is going to look like.''
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