This week I gave a presentation to one of Sandra Fish’s journalism classes at the University of Colorado, Boulder. (It was an overview of social media and citizen journalism initiatives.)
I hadn’t been in front of a bunch of college students in a while, so I took the opportunity for a quick news-consumption quiz. I did a pretty good job of guessing in my head beforehand what the responses would be, but my prediction proved a little off when it came to print editions of newspapers.
I asked which of the following students used frequently:
- Facebook: 99 percent. The class was about 100 students; when I asked who did NOT regularly used Facebook, only one brave student raised his hand. I may have been imagining it, but I think he looked defiant!
- MySpace: maybe 1/3 of the class. I think we can safely say that MySpace is primarily for the high school crowd. Of course, it’s possible that more students still use it, but it’s too embarrassing to admit it in front of your campus peers.
- Web as news source: vast majority of the class.
- TV news: a smattering of hands.
- Radio news: smaller smattering.
- Printed newspaper: maybe 20 percent.
These underclassmen were mostly either current or would-be journalism majors, so it’s safe to assume that they had more interest in news content than the average CU student. If anything, my guess would be that in a non-journalism class, a similar survey would have found less news consumption.
Frankly, I expected print newspaper readership among this wired college crowd to be lower. My prediction had been around 10 percent.
I’m not sure you need it, but there you have it: one more little piece of anecdotal evidence that today’s young generation doesn’t find print terribly relevant. I doubt that’s likely to change as they get older.
If you run a newspaper and want to reach them, perhaps you should try Facebook.
