Young people and the news. Harvard’s Shorenstein Centre has a metrics-based jeremiad out, with just that title. (In case you feel like it’s déjà vu all over again, I’ve posted on this before.)

Hand-wringing over young people and the news is simply a displaced generational concern for their lack of the right stuff. We don’t need to go back to Ancient Rome and Tacitus making unfavourable comparisons between young Germans and their Roman counterparts. No, we can go back to 1970s Texas instead. In 1976, Ruth Clark of Yankelovich put together a series of focus groups for a U.S. newspaper group called Young People and Newspapers: An Exploratory Study. This is what she found:

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.

Papers failed to respond to areas of interest and concern…

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.

That useless, newsless generation is now in its late 40s/early 50s and seems to be fumbling on as inadequately, or as brilliantly as its ancestors.

Thirty years later, and the contemporary fashion in scholarship (as in business) is for metrics ahead of focus groups. But forcing together the brittleness of numbers and the endless malleability of language doesn’t produce any great insight.

My favourite bit was the up-sum of the resentful nuclear family that comprised the early 1980s evening news audience:

Television news was an early-evening ritual in many families and, though the children might have preferred to watch something else, it was the only programming available at the dinner hour. By the time these children finished school, many of them had acquired a news habit of their own. Television’s capacity to generate interest in news through force feeding ended in the 1980s with the rapid spread of cable television.

Viewers no longer had to sit through the news while waiting for entertainment programming to appear. Television evening news did not lose its regulars, a reason in the cable era why its audience has aged as it has shrunk.

But TV news did lose the ability to create interest in news among adults who preferred other programming. And its capacity to generate interest in children
was greatly diminished.

A public morality that fails to distinguish habit from virtue is not one that should concern itself over the news viewing habits of its citizens.

The study’s author, Thomas Patterson, helpfully told the NY Times:

the future of news is going to be in the electronic media, but we don’t really know what that form is going to look like…

If it looks like Steve Boriss’s Future of News, then things may not be so bad after all:

[I]f much of news consumption has always been just another form of entertainment, is it a bad thing that our teenagers and young adults now have more choices, some of which, albeit not many, might even be more uplifting, inspiring, and educational than the news?

And so say all of us…