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…