Rebuilding expectations for news consumption

Former CNN Editor David T.Z. Mindich, author of Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don't Follow the News, will discuss how newspapers and society can encourage young adults to tune back into the news at API's seminar, Young Adult Readership: Connecting with the Millennial Market, April 3-7, in Reston.
In his book, Mindich explores the conventional wisdom "that young people have largely abandoned traditional news " only to discover that young nonreaders aren't getting their news from television or the Internet either.
API recently posed five questions to Mindich about young readers.

Q. Many newspapers are implementing the Readership Institute's eight imperatives to build readership but in your book, Tuned Out, you say they are too insular. Why?

A. I think that the solutions need to take place as much outside the newsroom as inside it because it really is a societal problem. We need to rebuild expectations for news consumption that include workplace expectations, school expectations, and just the expectation that you are going to converse about the news and use the news to stay informed to be a good citizen.

Q. What should newspapers be doing to increase readership? If you were a newspaper editor, what's the one change you would make in the newsroom or in the newspaper to attract new readers?

A. There are two things. A student once told me that following the news is like keeping up with a math class you've entered half way though the semester. He just found it so difficult to enter the news cycle for the first time, and I think that editors and reporters should probably do more to welcome the occasional reader. For example, if you are doing a story about Kenya, don't assume that your reader knows a lot about the country. Offer some reminders or a primer on basic facts. You could do that with political stories, domestic and international. But also I think that newspaper reporters and editors should leave themselves open to engaging their local communities and taking more time to reinvigorate the communities. It's not exactly what public journalists have been saying for years, which is that journalists become activists, and I don't necessarily buy that, but I do think that the public journalists have a point that democracy and civic engagement are the life blood of journalism and we really need to pay attention to its strength.

Q. What role does a newspaper's Web site play in attracting younger readers?

A. We know that newspaper readership, especially among young people, is way down. We know that the median viewer age of the network news shows is around 60, up from about 50 about 10 years ago. Is the Web going to be the answer to reversing about 30 or 40 years of declining news consumption? I think the answer's complicated. People turn to the Web for various reasons. The number one reason is e-mail, followed by Instant Messenger, and for students, research for classes. News is pretty far down on the list. However, the Internet is a wonderful source for news, particularly newspaper Web sites are a wonderful source for news, if people feel compelled to log on for that purpose. The Internet, more than almost any other medium, is driven by a reader's interests. If you want to follow the news deeply to develop a generalist's knowledge of the news or an expert's knowledge of a particular issue, there is no better medium than the Web. And if you want to avoid news completely, the Web is your medium.

Q. Why aren't publications like Quick and Red Eye not the solution?

A. The problem with a lot of publications aimed particularly at young people is that they may be successful at attracting a younger audience, but they often do so at a great price. Red Eye, for example, and Red Streak, two papers in Chicago, typically pull out most of their political content and treat young readers not as citizens but as consumers. Ultimately journalism's prime directive is to give us enough information so that we can be good citizens and hold our leaders accountable. And if a publication can attract younger readers without serving that function, then it's only serving itself and not serving democracy.

Q. What can newspapers learn from Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart "?

A. I think that newspapers and journalists of various media can learn a tremendous amount from Jon Stewart because first of all he's extremely funny and maybe those of us who do journalism should get more of a sense of humor. Also he does analysis and biting criticism that we probably should find more of in our publications. Finally, Jon Stewart cares about the stuff he covers or seems to, at least, in a way that we don't always see from journalists. The CNN model of emotional detachment need not be the only one practiced. Fox News, for example, has been widely cited as being successful because it's right wing. In fact, I think that its political slant is less of a reason for its success than the fact that most of the reporters and anchors on the show seem to care about the news they cover. I think that one can be detached politically, non-partisan, and objective while still allowing oneself to be emotionally engaged. We have a lot of models for that. Bill Moyers, while he basically had a non-partisan show, he seemed to care a lot about issues like poverty without being overly partisan. There are other models both in print and on television that embrace that. I think that print journalists, while not abandoning their non-partisanship, might experiment with different ways of engaging emotionally in their stories. [New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner] Thomas Friedman, for example, is hard to pin down on the political spectrum but yet he does seems to be emotionally invested in the stories that he covers.