Young people's news consumption - Essay Example

?Young people’s news consumption Introduction Over few decades, Newspapers have lost a lot of readers, especially young readers (Zerba, 2004). According to a survey done by the Pew Research Center in 2002, television and radio has followed the same pattern of losing its readers. There were implications for the decline in news readership for the role of mass media in creating an informed citizenry (Mindich, 2005). The value of news, whether being portrayed through television or via media, has been found to vary among different age groups. Even news on television fails to attract the interest of young crowd who often claim to follow the news only when something of particular relevance to them is happening. In fact, about 64% of the young adult viewers in UK have been found to have no interest for the news happening everyday on television. (Ursell, 2003) Today, the technology of journalism has improved significantly. The mode of presenting news to its viewers has been shifting from print age to digital age. But the culture of news consumption on daily basis has not developed yet among the young people. As said by Roger “With each passing year, young people grow less interested in the news, regardless of how it's delivered” (Roger, p. 1, 2009). With each passing year, young people have lost their interest on news, no matter in how they are delivered. (Ursell, 2003; Mindich, 2005) Statistics have shown that both newspaper circulation and network newscast ratings have declined persistently and the audience that was there grows ever older. (Even morning news shows, once thought immune to such trends, are now losing viewers.) “A Harvard survey found that only one in 20 teens and one in 12 young adults read a newspaper on close to a daily basis”. (Rogers, p.1 2009) On the other hand, the news casted online, fares a little better. In 2008, a recent study found that about 64% of 18-to-24-year-olds had viewed a newspaper online within the last year. But by 2009 that also had dropped to 54%. The figures are even more worrisome when the study focuses on whether a respondent had read online news at all - even once - in the last year. Hence, it is necessary to look into the matter that contributes to low news consumption among the youth. (Rogers, 2009) Causes of low news consumption among youth: Time constraints: The young crowd, especially the teenagers has lot of activities during a day. They have to attend school and some also have to go for work. They also have their other personal interests like sports, entertainment and socializing. As a result, they have very less time to have a watch on the news. It is not that they do not want to know what is happening over the world but the problem is that by the time they have a chance to look for news they become very tired. That time they want to relax more rather than to have a look on the news channels. (Hesmondhalgh, 2006; Mindich, 2005) Trivial and sensationalized news content: At times it has been seen young people criticizing the media for promoting gossip based stories, such as repeatedly broad casting the stories of the death of Anna Nicole Smith and the story covering Britney Spears shaving her head and going to rehab. The young crowd believes that there are many newsworthy stories that should come up prominently and aired properly. They often get bored by the content of the news as they feel it to be boring, not newsworthy, trivial, and depressing. (Leadbeater and Oakley, 1999; Zerba 2004). Dated delivery approaches: The young crowd prefers more short writings both in newspaper and on the internet and for instant delivery on the television. They want the news content to be presented in a proper way that will takes full advantage of the medium through which it is being delivered and should be right to the point. . (Leadbeater and Oakley, 1999; Zerba 2004). Negative parental influence: Even though most of the families subscribed to a newspaper, many of these respondents are not encouraged to read the newspaper. . (Leadbeater and Oakley, 1999; Zerba 2004). Strategies for increasing news consumption among youth: For teenagers and young adults, their attraction does not need always the relevancy of the content. What they want are as follows: Content relevancy: Young people mostly say that that they do not feel that news can affect them. But they are the ones who get most excited about things that directly affect their lives. They want the news organizations should cover more stories related to their generation and carve out some space for a section on just teens. They borrow a lot of interest in sports news, world news, local news and true entertainment news. They are also very interested in news regarding new technology, human interest, and government. The media should cut the section where they focus on fluff stories and celebrity gossips. The media must work more on promoting the good things in our world and not just all the tragedies and horrible things that happen all around. (Hesmondhalgh, 2006; Mindich, 2005) Length relevancy: The young generation has very little patience when watching out for some news. Most of them only focus on the headlines only. Hence, it is logical that either on hardcopy newspaper or on the internet, the headlines and news stories should be short and to the point. If they are interested in a story, they would look at its accompanying pictures or videos and will read the first couple of paragraphs in the story at most. Young generation has really shaped its own way of how they approach the news. They are able to take more in at a quicker pace and are easily get bored if the news content drags on too long. (Rogers, 2009) Media relevancy: The young crowd, nowadays, are more keen in looking out for news over the internet. While television is popular among them primarily as an entertainment source, it has remained a supplemental news source. Since many teenagers do not earn much money, they regard it important to have free access to news on these two platforms. There are many local newspaper companies who provide students free newspapers at university. Newspaper companies should also try to serve them on the internet since most of them do not read hardcopy newspapers. The youth believe that the news on the internet are updated on regular basis, easy to navigate, interactive, searchable, filterable, contain graphics and videos, provide more information than newspapers for optional in-depth reading, handy for those who has a computer along thereby enabling to view news from various digital devices and allowing time-shifting. As for online news video, there should be better quality news videos. Many young people prefer watching video rather than reading text and in future these on-line videos will be much faster and easier accessible. (Mindich, 2005; Zerba, 2004) Customizability: The online users should be allowed to customize their preferences so that the news they want to watch could be broad cast to them either on a customizable news website or social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook, or Yahoo News so that they did not have to spend time searching for such news. However, they should also get a chance to scan all the top stories to see if anything else would interest them. Majority of the viewers or readers think it important to keep up with the current events, trust established news institutions, and give newspapers a chance, as found out in some earlier studies. Since they lead fast-paced lives juggling education, jobs, social networking, hobby exploration, entertainment, sports, news consumption and so on, most of them have chosen to put the need for news on a lower priority of all their daily needs. Similarly, they use different media not just to access news, but, most of the time, to be engaged in their more highly prioritized activities. They use media to fulfill a wide range of gratifications. Therefore they are mostly light newsreaders or even non-readers. Very often, news consumption serves as a temporary escape from their prioritized needs. Hence, these impatient young people need short stories, a concise writing style, and multimedia visual presentations to bring them instant satiation. They watch out for news primarily to monitor the world around them, identify their personal values for truth and to have basic knowledge to refer to in conversations. They like to control what news to access and how to access it. For some readers, they do not just want to be passive news receivers but also want to contribute content, via participatory media, such as blogging and podcast. They are mostly not financially stable hence free access to news is important to them. Hand-held devices such as PDAs, MP3 players and cell phones play an inconsequential role in young mass news consumption because such consumption is regarded as costly and inconvenient. (Mindich, 2005; Zerba, 2004) Conclusion: It can finally be concluded that the common cause to light or non-newspaper reading among youth are lack of time, use of another news medium, cost and lack of interest in the content. Parental influence also plays a key factor in the news consumption behavior of the younger generations. It seems that a ripple effect of non-newspaper reading through the parental generation born in the mid 1950s-1960s has taken effect and is ongoing. Most of these parents had very little of news consumption and therefore have rarely encouraged their children to follow news and to keep themselves updated with the world news. The news industries, mainly newspaper companies, have been on the right track in the last decade or so to pull resources together to disseminate news across media platforms to reach different reader or viewer groups - such convergence effort seems transitional The heavy-text-oriented news presentation approach can expect to get doomed among the younger generation though text will still play an important role in news presentation. In coming years, a true convergence will come where the news industry provides the younger generation an experience of consuming high-quality multimedia news that is customizable and relevant to them all online through computers or other more convenient and less expensive hand-held devices with an opportunity for audience to be easily engaged in participatory journalism. (Zerba, 2004) Reference: 1. Hesmondhalgh, D. 2002. The Cultural Industries. London: Sage. 2. Leadbeater, C and Oakley, K 1999. The Independents: Britain's new cultural entrepreneurs, London: Demos. 3. Hesmondhalgh, D (ed) 2006. Media Production. Maidenhead: Open University Press 4. Ursell, G. 2003. ‘Creating Value and valuing creation in contemporary UK television or “dumping down” the workforce’, Journalism Studies, Vol 1(1): 31-46. 5. Mindich, D.T.Z. 2005. Tuned out, Why Americans under 40 Don’t Follow the News. New York: Oxford University Press. 6. Zerba, A. 2004. ‘Growing up with Parents Who Read and Watch the News: What Is the Effect on College Students?’, paper presented to the 2004 Association of Education for Journalism and Mass Communication Annual Conference, Toronto. 7. Rogers, R. 2009. The Technology of Journalism Improves, But Young People Still Ignore the News. Available at: http://journalism.about.com/od/trends/a/youngpeople.htm (7th May, 2011) Read More