There is often the common perception out there that young people don't care about the news -- in part because they're not reading the newspaper or watching the evening news. The reality is that they are still consuming news just not in traditional ways -- The success of The Daily Show (and now The Colbert Report) and The Onion, tell us that news served up with a side of satire seems to work well. Whether television's attempts at hipper news like Anderson Cooper 360 or tapping into user generated content like Al Gore's Current TV or ABC's iCaught will attract younger viewers remains to be seen.

As for newspapers, I'm afraid I'm in the camp that believes young people won't read them -- with the exception of college newspapers or possibly the tabloids that are easier to read on the subway. The newspaper industry is coming to grips with this, too, and is finally beginning to focus on how to attract younger readers to its websites. They are also realizing who the competition is -- portals. That's how young people like to consume their news online -- surf and click when something catches their eye. Editor & Publisher ran an interesting dispatch from the 7th World Young Readers Conference, a biennial event hosted by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), in partnership with the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) and the Norwegian newsprint maker Norske Skog. Here's what stood out to me:

This new generation effortlessly juggles multiple media, and they don't think of going to a newspaper Web site first for news, adds Michael Smith, executive director of the Media Management Center and Readership Institute at Northwestern University. Aggregators like Google, AOL, and Yahoo, he says, "are just as trusted as newspaper sites."

Young people are "grazers," according to a recent Readership Institute study, who don't go looking for news, but will stop to read "if it catches my eye," or if they "bump into something." That's a newspaper-friendly characteristic, Smith argues: "They are placing enormous value on something newspapers hold dear -- the value of serendipity, of reading stories we don't know we're interested in until we see them."

And yet, he adds, it's the portals who are meeting that need -- not newspapers.

Posted by anastasia