The young and the news
Cory Bergman October 7th, 2006
If you want to feel old, ask some young people about how they consume news. An ONA Saturday morning panel featured four “digital natives” ranging from 12 to 20 years old who’ve grown up always living in a technological world. Dale Steinke reports below…
Think RSS feeds, off-beat news links shared among friends via IM, social-networking sites, e-mail alerts and short-form stories. No TV in real-time.
When asked if they read newspapers, several moments of silence. “Your hands get all black from the ink,” 15-year-old Jordan King said, drawing some of the biggest laughs of the morning from the online folks and cringes from the print folks.
Interestingly, panel members said they generally don’t trust blogs, unless it’s an entertainment blog, because “who cares if it’s true,” joked Elsi Wu.
As for that offbeat news angle: “News is only fun when it’s out of the ordinary,” Wu said, adding everything else is run-of-the-mill. Take that, you government and political reporters.
Mary Specht, 20, said her friends don’t e-mail much, relying more on messaging, but when they do, they use Gmail.
She noted that the other day she saw Google has started adding links to related stories in a column to the right of e-mail messages, saying it would probably help us online media types a lot if we could figure out how to get our headlines in there too.
So why do her friends use Gmail? Because they trust the Google brand.
N.S.
9 Comments Add your own
1. DK | October 7th, 2006 at 12:11 pm
Insightful stuff - over on my own venture (MediaSnackers) I focus not just on how young people consume the news but media generally, plus how they are creators, producers and participants now not just consumers…
2. Tim | October 8th, 2006 at 2:13 pm
This doesn’t give me a warm feeling for these folks as informed voters in the future. If “news is only fun if it’s out of the ordinary” how do they keep track of mundane stories like how their county commissioners blow the highway funds on roads to the local fat-cat developer’s subdivision?
I agree that the media that they use to receive their news needs to be the media that they like to use (whatever that is), but I’m sure wondering whether they pay attention to real news, or just the “yellow journalism”-style stories.
3. Leonard | October 8th, 2006 at 3:11 pm
This doesn’t give me a warm feeling for these folks as informed voters in the future.
But think of how politically informed most 15 year olds have been, since the beginning of time. It doesn’t mean they won’t develop a taste for more thought provoking and insightful commentary down the track, but it does mean they will want to get it when and how they want it. I think a lot of journalists get anxious because new media keeps saying “this is your audience of the future.” It’s not. The audience of the future is just that; in the future. For now we get to practice creating mobile news content for 15 year olds. In five years time we should hopefully have a handle on that, but we’ll need to be creating content for these same people as college students, then again as newly employed, then again as new parents, each with different requirements and interests, but more than likely all used to getting their news how and when they want it.
Just think of “Paris Hilton updates” as practising for the future.
4. scion | October 9th, 2006 at 10:39 am
Interesting comment about their distrust of blogs… While their skepticism is commendable, their facile dismissal is a disappointment. But given our celebrity-soused, entertainment-happy culture, why would a 15 year-old pay attention to the GOP, Sunnis and tax incentives? There’s no soundtrack. When I was 15, I was *forced* to read TIME magazine every week and summarize world news stories for my World History class! Jordan King is right, “Your hands get all black from the ink.” Funny thing is, my hands are still stained today. I wonder: are my ink-stained hands the iPod-hearing-impaired ears of tomorrow?
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