Why newspapers don’t appeal to young people

Posted by on . 5 comments.

I’ve lived in three states in 2007.

Clearly, I don’t have a subscription to a newspaper (unless you count The Economist as a newspaper and not a magazine), and I know most of my peers don’t either. Us not-too-far-out-of-college people are not settled yet, and it’s hard to justify subscribing to something or caring about something if you don’t think you’ll be in that area long.

This is why newspapers have to realize lightening fast that the Web is the only way to attract a certain segment of the population. Just because I’m not settled, doesn’t mean I don’t want to be informed, but it does mean I can’t form an attachment to one area or paper.

I read washingtonpost.com frequently (I’ve spent almost all of 2007 in the D.C. metro area). I’m not about, however, to subscribe to that publication or any other newspaper.

Will I still be in Alexandria, Va. a year from now? I’m not sure, but I’m fairly confident I’ll be in the D.C. area for awhile to come. This is why I’ll continue to read washingtonpost.com, politico.com and other Web sites in the area.

I’ll be honest, I’d love to see a loudounextra.com site for my county too. I’d go there frequently, especially since I don’t know the area well. What better way to start a connection with a community than through a site that will connect me with all the things I want to know.

I don’t know the good restaurants (or any really), where churches are, what there is to do around here or even what’s going on in the area. If I moved to another area in D.C. next year or 2009, I’d love a site like loudounextra.com for that area too.

You have to build products that make sense for your users. Newspapers increasingly make less sense as people switch jobs, careers and areas more often in a lifetime. They especially make little sense for segments of the population that haven’t settled.

I’m confident that a certain segment of the population will always enjoy a written product. It makes sense for people who are settled and have a strong connection to a community. If they are retired, and have more time to dedicate to reading through a product, they will have an even stronger connection.

But for most people, the Web will make the most sense. Trust me, it’s not that young people don’t want to be informed and part of a community. We just want to be informed in our own terms (pick and choose content) and part of the communities that make the most sense for us (social networks).

  • bored_at_work

    I was kind of surprised what this post was about — I guess I was expecting my own answer to why newspapers don’t appeal to young people.

    I’ve seen a lot of newspapers attempt to put out a print product specifically for the 18-26 or 21-30 crowd. They’re terrible. For some reason, the people launching these things think that young professionals only care about happy hour, movies, concerts and restaurants. All we care about is entertainment. Do they really think we’re that one-dimensional?

    There’s a market out there (probably on the Web) for a publication with information and stories relevant to young people’s lives. To be honest, no matter how great my newspaper’s Web site becomes, I wouldn’t be interested in it — its content is geared toward parents and senior citizens.

    What the younger crowd needs is the right content packaged the right way. Stories about people our age and how national stories affect people our age. Just please, no more lists of “hot bars.”

  • http://www.patthorntonfiles.com pat

    Bored,

    I think there are many reasons newspapers don’t appeal to young people, but I think the actual print version of a newspaper will have a hard time appealing to people who aren’t settled. That’s why Web sites are so important to reach that demographic.

    The people running newspapers or the marketing staffs are all much older than us, and they think we can’t possible be interesting in real news. They create these “hip” publications to compete with alternative publications, but alternative press are aimed at different people. What appeals to young counterculturists probably doesn’t appeal to young professionals.

    Yet, papers think we are one in the same.

    The Iraq War means a lot to us, so does the fact that our age group is the least insured with or how about paying for college and graduate school? the environment is another big topic, so is social security (and it’s lack of a future) or how about how politicians have sold our generation down the river with a huge debt to appease today’s old people? I can think of countless stories and themes that appeal to young Americans, but as you said newspapers go after older adults and senior citizens.

    Can they really expect to grab our attention with stories, no matter the format, that have no value to our lives? I can read the Post because it has news that applies to everyone, but most local papers aren’t worth my time.

    I think a smart company or venture capitalist could hit a gold mine creating a national news site aimed at young professionals and the topics that matter most to them.

  • http://bhamterminal.com Andre Natta

    I recently started a hyperlocal blog called The Terminal here in Birmingham, AL as sort of a response to getting something up for folks in our age group. I’m not sure if it’s a matter of being settled as much as it is the notion that young people are not drawn to newsprint like they used to be. It’s about instant gratification and knowing what’s happened as soon as it’s happened with links to other people’s opinions may serve them better than what’s been printed. I’m not sure it will necessarily work, but it’s definitely been an interesting experience so far because there are a lot of people that we’d consider “older” that are reading the site too. It could just be a shift in priorities especially in a world where tools that are supposed to make our lives easier tend to remove some of the more relaxing parts of our day.

    Great post BTW!

  • http://smartnewsnc.com Jim McBee

    A few disjointed observations:

    If you do it right, people of all ages love the “hyperlocal” stuff — i.e., community and people news as opposed to government meeting coverage. Classroom instead of school board. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of expensive manpower to do local news well — not everything can be crowdsourced.

    Free newspapers are growing; paid circ. is tanking. It’s hard to justify requiring people to pay for news in the Internet economy.

    Figure out how to get local retailers to buy into a local Web site — enough of them to support the relatively large newsroom that goes with — and you’ve got it nailed.

  • http://www.matthewdasilva.com Matthew da Silva

    Young people are (1) inherently conservative and (2) not attuned to traditional ‘ideas’. Celebrity and popular culture provide a platform to express ideas. Further, the postmodern paradigm validates individuals as opposed to traditional social units, such as political parties, unions, companies. Each voice has an equal value?

    One of the items listed as motivators for journalists, in our media writing class, was ‘the unusual’. I think fresh angles on on-going stories are required. But to achieve them, journalists will basically need to go back to school.

    Most journalists are canonical liberals due to education and the persistence of historical projects such as Humanism (although most wouldn’t have a clue what it actually means), which are not yet complete especially in second- and third-world countries.

    Because of this bias, most cleave to notions inherited from preferences associated with recent shifts in power, dating back to the sixties. They ignore hundreds of years of development visible in the history of the English-speaking peoples, let alone those in continental European countries, which are slowly catching up with former British colonies.

    They alienate many. Nothing could be more boring than a protest march that aims to save rainforests, for example. Nothing causes me to roll my eyes back in my head like another popular music event that states its aim as ending poverty.

    And residents of developing countries are confused because the dialectical tools bequeathed to them by the post-war generation are proving inadequate in their effort to modernise.