Should Newspapers Give Up On The Young?

Philip M. Stone June 4, 2008

It’s pretty well understood that not too many young people pay to read newspapers these days and that most attempts by paid-for newspapers to woo the young to print have failed, so newspaper executives Tuesday discussed whether trying to get the young back to print is really worth all the effort. And the general feeling seemed to be to give up the lost cause.

And the executives at the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) aznnual Congress in Gothenberg, Sweden, even heard from an anthropologist that the young are probably lost from print forever. Don’t just think that as they get older they will switch back to newspapers. It’s not going to happen.

Dr. Katarina Graffman of Inculture AB of Sweden says that based on her experiences, “I don’t think young people will start reading newspapers when they get old. It’s not just about having a defense position, hoping they’ll interact with newspapers when they grow up and settle down. They live in a media world where everything is integrated, and they don’t make differentiation.”

Add that to research by Robert Barnard of Dexcode in Canada who completed a survey of 3,500 people aged 15 – 29 in The Netherlands, the US  and Finland, who said they much prefer television to  newspapers and say television comes out on top for credibility, relevancy, convenience and popularity. “Young people do not seem to understand the inherent value and difference in newspaper content versus other news media. TV still dominates even in perceptions of credibility and depth of coverage,” he said.

So given all that are the young a lost cause? Well, not necessarily. Barnards’s suggestions to get the young interested in newspapers: get students in schools reading newspapers (In the US to cut costs newspapers seem to be cutting back on newspaper in education projects – a cost-cutting with long-term ramifications), and getting parents heavily involved in getting their kids to read newspapers.

That last point takes one back to 2006 when California Governor Arnold Swarzenegger told The Los Angeles Times that he and his wife “are teaching our children to read the paper in the morning. We started with their favorite section, with Patrick it’s sports. One of the girls looks for the fashion thing, and the other looks for movies. We’re teaching them that when they get up in the morning and come down and make breakfast, read a page. Whatever your favorite page is, we want to create this thing that gets you addicted to it.” Seems more households need to get into that act.

The Decode study showed that when young people leave home it marks an important crossroad for newspapers – their newspaper readership drops off greatly and yet their interest in news is at its peak.  And the cause for losing readers may well be that editorial copy directed at them is really disconnected from what they want to read.  Most of the stories about their age group are negative, they are not interested much in politics (Obama being a notable exception) and music and film top their list of interests.

And Gavin O’Reilly, WAN president and chief operating officer of Independent News and Media, takes the view, however, that newspapers are concentrating too much on trying to keep the young reader. He thinks it is all a plot by advertising agencies that are fixated on youth readers. He says newspapers should be aimed at all generations. “We also need to explain to the young that while the Internet is overwhelming in content it is pretty underwhelming in reliability.”

But he disagreed with the anthropologist – he believes people as they get older will eventually come back to newspapers.

Anthropologists and those who study how various cultures act seem to be in favor these days in guiding the media on how they can attract various groups. The Associated Press presented a study made by The Context-Based Research Group, an ethnographic research firm that says the main problem the young have with news is that they are being inundated with too much information.

And the study said there is a dramatic change in the way the young multitask. Gone are the days when they would sit down and just watching TV or just read a newspaper – now they are involved in several activities at the same time such as answering e-mails or instant messaging as they listen to/watch the news. So news no longer gets their full attention.

"Our observations and analysis identified that consumers' news diets are out of balance due to the over-consumption of facts and headlines," said Robbie Blinkoff, co-founder and head anthropologist at Baltimore, Md.-based Context-Based Research Group.

The authors recommended that news producers develop easier ways for readers to discover in-depth content and to avoid repetitious updates of breaking news.