Dog Bites Man; Kids Don't Care
A few years ago I was privy to a newspaper company's top-secret plan to reach the youth market--which spent a dozen pages establishing that, um, kids don't read newspapers. Look, if you need to spend that much time figuring that out and explaining it to your top executives, you're dead before you even start planning your strategy.
Comes now a Harvard study showing that, gasp, young people don't care much about news. (Did somebody really get paid to figure this out?) Only one in 20 rely on a newspaper for news. And that 5 percent looks even more shaky when you kick in the 2-3 percent margin of error.
There's really no news here. Young people have never cared much about news; now they care even less about fossilized news delivery formats like newspapers. And what are newspapers doing about it? Um, starting newspapers aimed at the youth market! Or publishing condescending kids' news pages (which appear in the very newspapers the kids don't read)! Great thinking.
Newspapers and media companies that want to reach younger readers should be doing it on the Web--not just with Web sites or blogs, but with tools that reach kids where they are: widgets for Facebook and MySpace, products tailored for mobile devices, a heavy emphasis on Web video. Stop doing studies to find out where the youth market has gone, stop trying to reach young readers with products from a generation or two ago, and start creating products that audience actually wants. Stumped on that? Hire some kids to help you build them, and then listen to them. What they and their friends want is where you should be--not desperately defending the media you grew up with.
Well said!!
Posted by: Mary Specht | July 18, 2007 at 09:42 AM