Post Scripts: More of a viewing than a reading nation

You might think that with the United States military fighting a protracted war in Iraq and a lively presidential campaign already gliding into headlines almost daily, Americans of all ages are wound up in current affairs and are consuming news like never before, right?
Sorry, not so, especially not teenagers and young adults according to a report last week by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In fact, most teenagers and adults 30 and younger are not following the news closely at all, the report “Young People and News” concluded. It is based on a national sample of 1,800 Americans that included teenagers, young adults aged 18 to 30 and older adults.
Thomas Patterson, a professor of government and the press at Harvard who conducted the survey, said young people today do not make an appointment with news every day the way older adults do.
“We found most young adults don’t have an ingrained news habit,” he said. “Most children today, when watching television, are not watching the same TV set their parents are watching. What the survey revealed was that what respondents meant when they said they pay attention to the news, they actually are engaged with a more glancing, superficial basis than anything we would have hoped. Young people seemed to think that just listening to the radio in the background was listening to the news.”
The results were especially grim for newspapers. Only 16 percent of the young adults surveyed, age 18 to 30 said they read a newspaper every day and only nine percent of teenagers said they did. That compared with 35 percent of adults over 30. Happily, despite the belief that teenagers flock to the Internet, the survey found that teenagers and young adults were twice as likely to get news from television than from the Web.
Despite all this, the situation is not hopeless. Jane Hurt, the editor of RedEye, a free newspaper that is published by the Chicago Tribune especially for young, urban professionals, said her publication has succeeded and even expanded its audience by adopting some of the lessons learned from TV and the Internet and by exploring new avenues of interest.
“We may have a short face-off with two sides of an issue,” she said. “We believe it is a way to tell stories in a form like younger people are used to getting on the Internet.”  She said she reminds her editors that younger readers are used to customizing their lives. “They pick and choose what they want to see on their iPods and watch whatever they want,” she said.
Still her publication and newspapers in general may be facing an uphill battle.
“My sense is newspapers in traditional form are not going to be able to recapture this audience,” said Patterson. “What’s happening over time is that we have become more of a viewing nation than a reading nation and the Internet is a little of both. My sense is, like it or not, the future of news is going to be in the electronic media, but we really don’t know for sure what is going to be next in the electronic media, and we really don’t know what that form or process is going to look like. My feeling is that the printed media, newspapers and books in particular, will always be with us one way or another.
Newspapers can be read at your leisure while TV or other forms of electronic news must be watched on schedule or it simply disappears.