Article

Re-thinking journalism : how young adults want their news

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Abstract

The term "young adults" is often used loosely without a clear definition of who this demographic is. This study defines young adults by examining generational differences, their beliefs, uses and nonuses of media, news interests, wants, values for following the news, and expectations and reading experiences of news stories. The uses and gratifications approach and expectancy-value theory provided a framework for this study. Three methodological approaches were used: a secondary data analysis of three national surveys, focus groups and an experiment. The secondary data analysis findings showed the youngest age group (18-24) is leading the new news routine online with news aggregator sites, major and local news sites. The two youngest age groups (18-24 and 25-29) differ from each other and older age groups in their worries, goals, perspectives, beliefs, news interests, media uses, nonuses and political knowledge, and should be studied separately. Stances on social issues and technology are not as clearly defined by age. The findings suggest one's life stage is behind some of the differences. Since no published study to date has conducted focus groups exclusively with nonreaders of print newspapers ages 18-29 to examine their news consumption and nonuses of print newspapers, the present study broke new ground. The findings showed these young adults want searchable, effortless, shorter, more local, accessible anytime news. Both groups (18-24 and 25-29) wanted less negative news, but the younger group justified crime coverage. A few younger group participants expressed a difficult time reading the news and a bias in coverage, especially politics. The experiment used storytelling devices in an attempt to make news writing more digestible, interesting, relevant to young adults' lives, and informative. The findings showed "chunking" text improved perceived comprehension. The device of adding background information, context and a definition improved text recall. The experiment also examined expectations that young adults have prior to reading hard news. For a politics story, experimental group participants expected to understand the story less and have less of an interest than they did. Using these findings, this study suggests ways to get more of this audience (18-29) to tune into the news. Journalism

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... A number of studies have suggested that young adults valued print news as much as older adults, but they used theoretical methodology -isolating a comparison about reading print versus digital; exposing young adults to different experimental writing styles; or a hypothetical intent to pay (Baron, 2016;Zerba, 2009). Critics argue that it is a false choice because print newspapers are not competing just between their print versus digital editions for the affections of young readers; they're also competing against The New York Times, Instagram, Netflix, and Candy Crush. ...
Article
More than 20 years into newspapers’ digital experiment, most are still struggling in search of a business model while digital revenue remains a fraction of total revenue. To examine the sustainability of digital journalism, this study assesses the top 50 U.S. newspapers’ digital readership with the Multidimensional Web Attention Model. Empirical analyses using Nielsen and Comscore data identified problems with newspapers’ online readership across multiple dimensions (reach, popularity, loyalty, depth, and stickiness). Seven-day market reach is around 13%. Popularity varies but loyalty is low across the board – an average user makes no more than three visits a month (M = 2.53). Depth and stickiness are also underwhelming, with about two pages viewed per visit (M = 2.21) and slightly more than one minute spent on a page (M = 1.18). While local papers do not benefit from the economies of scale, national newspapers, despite more resources, outperform their local counterparts only on the popularity dimension. Mobile users constitute the majority but fall short on loyalty and depth. Users aged 18–24 remain a small portion of the newspaper audience. These findings parse out the industry-wide failure to engage online readers. At the core of newspapers’ digital sustainability problem is a readership that falls short in multiple ways.
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