The impacts of the Internet on the newspaper reading habits of the youth

Author: Paul Cauchon, published in Le Devoir on the 12th of January 2004. Edited and translated by Mathieu Lutfy for Social Rights Bulgaria.

It has become the latest obcession of newspaper editors today: how to attract the youth? Difficult question, while new studies and research investigate the decreasing newspaper readership of the youth.

Some editors try to stay optimist, saying that the habit to read newspapers comes with age. But according to new studies this is a mistake, members of every new generation keep their habits while getting older. Readers of 20 years old who currently don’t read newspapers will therefore not take the habit in 10 years, and this would have been demonstrated by analysis of the habits of the previous generations.

This data comes from a recent document published in the Winter edition (PDF document, 4.6mb) of the Nieman Reports, a quarterly publication of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. The group was created in 1937 to “elevate the quality standards of journalism”. It organises conferences, distributes prizes, and edits this publication of over 100 pages, of which more than 40 of this edition include seventeen articles dedicated to young readers, written by well-known newspaper directors, journalists and university professors.

This new generation is essentially a generation of “electronic readers”, as opposed to “paper readers”, says the editor and journalist Thomas Souto Corrêa. These youth read, but they read on computer screens, on electronic games and on their mobile phones. They are already “multimedia people” he says, where as the other generations are “monomedia”. We must therefore think as they do if we want to reach them, he adds.

To think like them. This preoccupation travels through all the document. All the authors mention that the youth are interested by information. But this information, they find it elsewhere, and by other means. They read the headlines from Internet sites. They discuss on discussion forums and blogs. They look at the broadcasts on information channels on television.

The question of the Internet is omnipresent in the seventeen texts. In fact, some studies show that the 18-24 years old prefer to take their information from the Internet rather than from a printed media. Many even consider that the information published on the Internet is of better quality. This is paradoxal, of course, since most of the big information sites on the Internet publish information from newspapers or television broadcasters.

The most multi-ethnic

Colleen Pohlig, who edits a publication for youth in the Seattle Times, makes a few interesting observations. This is the most multi-ethnic generation that we have seen, she says. These youth therefore want to get as much international news as possible. They want to read stories where they hear the voices of the youth. They want a more “fresh” writing style and media graphism, she says. They want interactive options on the Internet, such as discussion forums. They are preoccupied by social and politic issues, but they want to “read about people like them who try to make a difference in a world full of war, crime and injustice”.

Tom Curley, president of the Associated Press, adds that the youth want more useful news, not only news about sports and showbiz, as it is often believed. They search for information that is useful for their every day life.

As we can guess, many studies show that the most important element for reaching out to the youth is the development of Internet sites.

But the most important challenge that newspapers will have to face is the following: all the studies demonstrate that the youth also want the information for free. An editor of the Orlando Sentinel, Elaine Kramer, thinks that newspaper editors will soon have to find a solution to deliver newspapers to the youth for free, since this new generation has difficulty understanding the need to pay for newspapers, considering they can find equivalent information elsewhere for free, such as on the Internet.

This perception of information is rather big opposition to the traditionnal perception that on must pay more money for quality information, amongst other factors, as a recognition to the intellectual work.

John Hartman, a professor of journalism, thinks that newspapers must absolutely create a free weekly “product” for young adults, distrubuted in parallel to complete websites that would also be used to promote the merits of the daily “normal” edition to which they can eventually subscribe.