Little of the actual results from the Pew Research Center surprised me. What I do find surprising, even puzzling, however, is how media outlets are responding to such research. In reviewing the results of the Pew research, I found a few areas where it seemed the current concerns in the industry, at least in my limited experience, don’t completely reflect the results of the survey, at least not directly.
The one striking commonality between the Pew study and current editorial-and-executive talking points is an emphasis on courting younger readers. Though the Pew study measured news habits across all age groups over time, it seemed to highlight the 18-29 set in its results with special subsections like “Many Young People Get No News,” and “Web Helping Keep Younger Readers.” I believe this is also an emphasis of the research (very similar to Pew’s) conducted by Medill’s Media Management Center, and it certainly echoes the concerns I’ve heard from editors in my own experience. For example, the paper I will be interning at this summer required each of its intern finalists to send in a critique of one issue of their paper and their website. The questions on the critique were geared specifically to how the intern candidates, as young people in this coveted 18-29 age group, would suggest making the website more appealing to their peers. While I had suggestions for how the website could improve its utility overall, when it came to analyzing “people my age” and how the website would appeal to them, I was stumped. Reading the Pew results now, I realize it was because I must have somehow internally realized that “many young people get no news”: 27% of Americans under age 30 “did not get news from any of these sources yesterday.”
Yes, younger people are more likely to use the web and “stumble upon news” or go to the web specifically for news. But I think you can infer from these results that young people going to the web for news are the ones with significant news habits, regardless of the medium. Why, then, are we so worried about courting these younger audiences who aren’t interested in news in the first place? Granted, advertising complicates this equation a bit: the youngest age group Pew measured is roughly the same age group widely considered most desirable by advertisers. Therefore, even though we collectively aren’t watching, clicking and reading all that much, the advertisers will continue to hope we do so. It makes me wonder if editors that emphasize courting younger readers and seem so concerned about it are genuinely concerned that the civic engagement of my generation is, and has been, on the decline (which is what I suspect and, what primarily concerns me about the Pew results), or if they’re merely paying lip service to advertisers demands, hoping to hang on to their fragile business.
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