The news media is in the middle of an evolutionary process: developing, progressing and becoming more complex. And according to the media giants who spend billions of dollars every year to try to understand them, young people are the catalysts.
Some, however, question just how interested this generation is.
David Mindich -- former assignment editor at CNN and author of the book, "Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don't Follow the News" -- said in an interview on a media Web site that young adults "no longer see a need to keep up with the news."
Indeed, young people today are as intelligent as ever, they just appear to prefer Angelina Jolie to Wolf Blitzer.
In the early '70s, said Mindich, 74 percent of Americans in their mid-30s read the newspaper everyday. These days, fewer than 35 percent do.
Has Britney Spears wrecked our youth? Will young people, adrift and apathetic, be unprepared and daunted when their elders and the country's leaders relinquish the proverbial power reins?
Alesha Hardin thinks so.
Hardin, a 22-year-old Alabamian studying history and philosophy at
University of Alabama-Birmingham, expressed frustration over the
"ignorance" of her peers. Instead of gas prices, the war in Iraq
and bird flu, people focus on Paris Hilton, breast implants and
other such "stupid-ass" news, she said.
Hardin gets most of her news from the Internet. She reads Yahoo! News. She listens to National Public Radio. (She occasionally watches Nancy Grace on CNN, but only because she finds the show funny.) She tries to consume news everyday. She's in tune.
However not everyone agrees.
"People call our generation apathetic. We're not apathetic toward the news, we just don't want to hear the same old bull crap all the time," said John Fiske, a 22-year-old law student in San Diego.
"Nobody caters to us," he said, adding that the big television news cable networks -- CNN, FOX, MSNBC -- think they can attract young people by playing rap music at the beginning and end of their shows.
"We see right through it."
Fiske and two of his friends host a weekend radio talk show in San Diego on FreeFM, owned by CBS. They talk about, for instance, immigration, privacy and security, Duke lacrosse and hangovers induced by heavy drinking sessions at the bar. They average roughly 25,000 listeners -- mostly Generation Y adults in their young 20s -- who often call in.
Fiske and his co-hosts, Brent Williams and Kris White, attract enough listeners that FreeFM offered them air time on Saturdays in addition to their usual Sunday slot. The three men, all in their early 20s, demonstrate that news can, despite common assumptions, actually attract young people.
Generation Y wants the truth, Fiske said, "down-to-earth truth."
New media -- unabashed
New media is taking over ground once owned and ruled by old media. As young adults grow older, the Internet -- the preferred means by which to consume news among young people -- is supplanting traditional news formats like newspapers and television.
According to a 2006 report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, more Americans use the Internet on a regular basis to consume news. The report sites a Consumer Reports study which suggests that 11 percent of Americans now get their news online, up from 5 percent in 2002.
"Young people don't want to rely on the morning paper on their doorstep or the dinnertime newscast for up-to-date information," wrote Merrill Brown, founding editor-in-chief of MSNBC.com, in a 2004 report about the future of the news business. "In fact, they -- as well as others -- want their news on demand, when it works for them."
"The future news consumers and leaders of a complex, modern society, are abandoning the news as we've known it," Brown wrote. "A great number of them will never return."
Brown said in an interview that leaders of traditional media claim that young adults are apathetic because of the decline in readers and viewers (the average age of newspaper readers and TV-news watchers is around 53). However, said Brown, if you study recent voting trends, young people are more engaged than ever. "News is a different experience."
Adults 18 to 35 increasingly turn to Google News and Yahoo! News -- Web sites that constantly post fresh content collected from numerous sources from across the world. They also flock to blogs (Web-logs) for their unabashedly opinionated Web journal entries.
News is ubiquitous. You can download it from your computer then listen to it later on your iPod. You can access the news on your cell phone.
"Just because they get their news from cell phones doesn't make them inferior," said Jack McKenzie, a senior vice president at Frank N. Magid Associates, a media consulting firm. "They consume information on their own terms."
And because of the sheer size of this emerging generation, young people (whom McKenzie and others dub "the millennials") will inevitably cultivate the future landscape of media. "Because of the size ... this generation will determine the future of everything," said McKenzie, just as the Baby Boomers determined the last 25 years.
What will the new landscape look like? Fiske, the law student and talk show host in San Diego, said that an ideal news ambiance for young people necessitates three conditions.
One is medium: the news must be presented in the appropriate form -- "the Internet," said Fiske, who, to enlighten himself, says he scans the CNN, FOX and MSNBC Web sites everyday. Then he goes to the Drudge Report, a Web site managed by Matt Drudge who posts links to stories about entertainment and politics and other topics such as, for instance, the plight of a pregnant 11-year-old girl in Britain.
The second condition stipulates openness: young people, said Fiske, must feel comfortable asking questions and discussing issues in their own vernacular. By doing so, they will generate their own views, not acquire them through traditional media streams. "We have to be part of the equation, not have people tell us what to think."
Openness may be one reason why his show attracts listeners. People talk candidly. Even middle-aged folks tune in to hear what this young generation is talking about, said Fiske.
The third condition is transparency: Generation Y has grown tired, he says, of reckoning the hidden political motivations of writers and broadcasters. They want people to be up front.
Merrill Brown, the former editor of MSNBC.com, agrees: "In this new world of journalism, young people want a personal level of engagement and want those presenting the news to them to be transparent in their assumptions, biases and history."
Young people find transparency in, for example, blogs. Blogs don't demand grammatical correctness. Writers don't have to be objective. Writers don't even have to know anything about journalism. But blogs are permanent. And they are shaping the future of media.
The youth also have found what they consider transparency and personal engagement in Jon Stewart -- and now Stephen Colbert. "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report" (pronounced, ra-pore) present the news with tongue firmly planted in cheek.
"[Stewart] actually gets across a lot of information," said Fiske, who also thinks South Park contains "some legitimate commentary."
South Park, a cartoon that appears on Comedy Central along with "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report," is regularly scatological and offensive to some people.
But Fiske sees value in the show, because it is raw, entertaining and not afraid to confront issues such as racism. Generation Y is not offended. It's been brought up that way, Fiske said. "I hear comments all the time from older people, 'You shouldn't judge people by the color of their skin,' and I'm like, 'No s**t Sherlock.'"
-- By Oliver Read of Generation Next
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