Over at The Edit­ors — yes, it already sounds like a 70s Sunday night drama — Rod McK­en­zie is wor­ried about younger audi­ences (he’s editor of News­beat), but he thinks he knows what they want:

I think what young audi­ences want is robust, inter­est­ing, pas­sion­ate debate about stor­ies and issues that affect them and their lives.

Well, no one wants flac­cid, dull, blood­less debate about stor­ies and issues that don’t affect them.

But ser­i­ously, what’s caus­ing young people to turn their backs on tra­di­tional, god-fearing media? Are they insane? Or on drugs? Don’t they TRUST us? I’m hav­ing a Life on Mars moment.

Wak­ing up in 1976, what do we find? Five years ago in 1971, 71 per­cent of 18–24 year olds reg­u­larly read news­pa­pers. Today that figure’s dropped to 61 percent.

Young people. Ali­en­a­tion. Tra­di­tional media. Yes, there’s a crisis brew­ing. Time to com­mis­sion some ser­i­ous mar­ket research. Per­haps it can help us under­stand what’s going wrong!

Young adults feel that news­pa­pers neither under­stand them nor ‘like’ them.

A shock­ing find­ing for news­pa­per lead­ers was that young people trust at an increas­ing rate in TV but that their feel­ing of bias in news­pa­pers has increased.

“On tele­vi­sion you can see the news tak­ing place and come up with your own con­clu­sions,” one inter­viewee said.

“Ride a bus and the people read­ing news­pa­pers are usu­ally middle-aged or older,” said one interviewee.

Another said: “We talk a lot about tele­vi­sion shows when we’re together, but not about newspapers.”

Papers failed to respond to areas of interest and con­cern, like the envir­on­ment, enter­tain­ment, psy­cho­logy, mys­ti­cism, con­sumer­ism, health…

Another hypo­thesis for declin­ing read­er­ship of papers among the youth group was that papers are too “news-oriented” and that more “soft” news is needed. They are inter­ested in more fea­ture news, as well as com­ment­ary and dis­cus­sion. They also seem to want more enter­tain­ment fea­tures, more con­sumer inform­a­tion and more “how-to” articles.

All that is from research done for a Texan news­pa­per chain. The con­cerns of news­pa­per execs? Audi­ence frag­ment­a­tion, and com­pet­i­tion from rival media.

They thought they could win back read­ers by becom­ing more consumer-oriented, with younger report­ers, more opin­ion­ated and diverse colum­nists, more sec­tions, and more entertainment.

In 1997 the com­pany that did that research sold its papers, radio and TV sta­tions and went into dir­ect marketing.

Per­son­ally, I only wanted to be a journ­al­ist because I felt ali­en­ated and unrepresented…