In trying to reach young people, says David Mindich, chairman of the journalism department at Saint Michael's College in Colchester, Vt., newspapers face a daunting challenge. Mindich was teaching a class of undergraduates early in 2001 when he first realized that young people are completely turned off to the news. During the Senate confirmation hearings for John Ashcroft as attorney general, Mindich gave his class of 23 students a pop quiz to determine their familiarity with American law. Eighteen of his students couldn't name a single Supreme Court justice; only one knew Ashcroft was the attorney general nominee, and several believed it was Colin Powell.
The experience prompted Mindich to dig deeper into what young people knew -- or, rather, didn't know -- about the world around them. He found mountains of evidence and gathered it into a 2005 book, "Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don't Follow the News." At a time of greater access to media than ever before, Mindich says that the typical American young person isn't reading a newspaper, watching news on television, listening to it on the radio, or reading it online in any significant depth.
And of all the news media that young people aren't following, newspapers are the source they're not following most. Even the newspaper industry's own readership statistics -- which are optimistic compared to other organizations' estimates -- bear this out. In 1970, on average, 72 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds read a weekday newspaper, not much lower than the percentage of older people who did so. Today, the industry says, only 40 percent of young people typically read a weekday newspaper, compared to 66 percent of those over 55 who do.
Surveys by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press (PDF) paint a grimmer picture. In 1996, when Pew asked people whether they'd "read a newspaper yesterday," just 29 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds said they had. And when the organization asked the same question in 2004, the number had fallen to 23 percent. Compared to older people surveyed and to young people of previous generations, people my age today appear abysmally unaware of what's in print.
The primary social symptom of these news habits, Mindich says, is the growing "knowledge gap" between the young and old. Polling data show that in the 1950s and 1960s people under 40 were almost as well informed about the world as their parents. But today, Americans under 40 generally know a lot less than their elders.
Mindich cites a 2000 poll in which only 4 percent of people aged 18 to 24 picked John McCain as the Republican presidential candidate who advocated campaign-finance reform. Twenty-eight percent of those over 65 got it right. Mindich asked dozens of young people similar questions -- about local and national leaders, about the countries in the president's "axis of evil" and the locations of the plane crashes in the 9/11 attacks -- and found similar results. If space aliens were to land tomorrow and interrogate our 20-year-olds, they'd have to conclude we are a backward civilization; meanwhile, the 20-year-olds, to judge from Mindich's data, would likely mistake the aliens for members of Congress.
Mindich says it's plain why young people aren't interested in the news. All of us, young and old, are swimming against a powerful tide. We may have more access to news today than we ever did in the past, but the amount of non-news media we face drowns out everything else. As Mindich sees it, kids are bingeing on non-news media: entertainment, sports, video games, the Web, and basically everything on TV, even what's on the news stations. (See Grace, Nancy.)
For a long while, folks in the newspaper industry didn't think much of these factors; one common mantra was that despite youthful inattention, young people would start reading newspapers once they grew up. "I think there was a kind of denial," says Merrill Brown, the former editor of MSNBC.com who now works as a consultant to newspapers. "The thing you heard all the time is that they'll all come back when they become homeowners and parents. That has no credibility anymore. Nobody's buying it. People are not coming back."
Now many who study the news business think of news-reading as a habit that, like smoking cigarettes, is best picked up young, and that it's difficult to warm to later in life. If you choose to keep up with "American Idol" rather than American diplomatic policy toward Iran when you're 25, you won't likely be doing much different when you're 55.
To that end, says Janet Robinson, CEO of the New York Times Co., the Times has built an extensive program to get its daily on college campuses. "This has been a purposeful effort on our part to make sure they know what the Times can bring to them," Robinson says of the paper's college-age audience. And, she adds, the program is working; in surveys, young people say they read the paper often, a statistic she regards with some optimism. "If young people are introduced to the habit of reading the Times, it becomes a very trusted source for them in the years to come," she says.
The niche papers have turned to a new way to get young readers -- give them a dollop of non-news as a tasty come-on and sprinkle some news inside, an editorial trick akin to feeding your dog a pill by covering it in applesauce. Newspaper analysts call this necessary. Unless a story on the Hamas victory in the Palestinian territories is penned by James Frey himself, they say, it will never be as exciting to a 20-year-old as a piece on Angelina and Brad. Given all they're bombarded with, most readers will always choose the easier option.
Next page: Young people do want to be informed, responds the editor. Look at the Web
