Cover Story
Cover Story
Civic Duty
By Cheryl Arvidson
“Lifelong Readers: Driving Civic Engagement,” a new Foundation study, provides fresh evidence of how important it is for newspapers to focus on young readers.
The study shows that young people who use newspapers for schoolwork and read newspaper content for teens are more likely to volunteer, vote and engage in civic expression as adults.
“Driving Civic Engagement” reflects the input of more than 1,500 people ages 25 to 34, who were surveyed about their volunteer activities, political involvement and voting behavior. They also were asked to recall their newspaper habits as teens – specifically, if they remembered using the newspaper in class or for homework, and if they read newspaper content for teens. Their responses indicate that as the number of newspaper influences in a teen’s life increases, the likelihood of future volunteerism, voting and civic expression rises dramatically.
When researchers compared the civic involvement of young adults who had various newspaper-related experiences with that of individuals who had no such experiences, there was a marked difference in civic engagement in every category.
And future civic involvement was even more likely when teens augmented those newspaper-related activities with discussions of current events with parents, other teens or classmates in a school setting.
BEYOND VOTER TURNOUT
“The message is that newspapers can affect the course of history with regard to how aggressively they do Newspaper In Education programs and have youth sections or youth pages in their papers,” says Bruce Bradley, publisher of The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, president/publishing group of Landmark Communications Inc. and chairman of the Foundation Board of Trustees. “To the extent they do those things successfully, they will have more young readers and more civically engaged readers in the future.”
Often, civic engagement is measured solely by voter turnout in national elections, but the Foundation research delved deeper and focused on a wider variety of activities because voting alone does not give the true picture. Although 25- to 34-year-olds do have the lowest voter turnout of all age groups, they also are volunteering and engaging in significant efforts to better their communities at a much higher rate than previous generations.
“Because of that seeming contradiction, we decided to look beyond voter turnout to find the true measure of commitment to community and civic engagement,” says Margaret Vassilikos, senior vice president and treasurer of the Foundation.
She notes that the study underscores the importance of providing teen-oriented news to attract young readers and encouraging programs that integrate newspapers into classrooms, homework assignments and discussions of current events.
“By taking these steps, not only will newspapers be more likely to develop a solid core of future readers, but their communities also will benefit from the efforts and commitment of those young adults to make the world a better place,” Vassilikos says.
To measure degrees of civic engagement, the study looked at three areas:
- Civic activities that focus on improving the local community, primarily by volunteer work and fund-raising
- Voice activities that offer people a way to speak their minds and make their feelings known on political and social issues
- Voting behavior, which includes not only actual voting, but also the degree of involvement in campaigns as measured by support of candidates and activity aimed at encouraging others to vote.
The study, conducted for the Foundation by MORI Research of Minneapolis, focused on 26 separate activities that involved volunteering in communities, contributing resources, expressing opinions in public forums on social or political issues, and participating in election campaigns.
The link to newspapers was established by responses from people who remembered newspapers being used in their high school classes, those who had homework assignments that included reading newspapers, and those who remembered reading or looking at teen-oriented sections in their local newspapers.
Of the three measures of civic engagement, volunteerism was the activity that carried over most frequently from the teen years to young adulthood. Sixty percent of the survey participants said they had volunteered as teens. Of that group, 62 percent said they had been involved in volunteer activities in the past year.
Almost all the respondents reported doing some volunteering or donating money at some point in their lives, and three-fourths did so in the past year. “Past year” statistics are the best indicator of current behavior.
Seventy-eight percent of the respondents said they had volunteered or engaged in community service for no pay at some point in their lives for projects such as tutoring or youth mentoring, community improvement, arts, political or environmental work, charitable efforts or disaster relief. Nearly half (46 percent) said they had done so in the past year.
The same number, 78 percent, reported donating money to a group or association involved in civic activities at some point in their lives, with 62 percent donating money in the past year.
Individuals who said they had used newspapers both for classroom work and homework had a higher volunteer rate than those who did neither. Those who said they read both their local newspaper and that paper’s teen section as teens were more likely to have engaged in volunteer civic activities in the past year than those who read only the newspaper or the teen section as teens.
The impact on future volunteerism soars when teens have all three newspaper-related experiences. For example, 74 percent of young adults who used newspapers in the classroom, newspapers as homework and read a teen section as teens said they had donated money to a civic cause in the past year, compared with 51 percent who had no newspaper contact.
Sixty-two percent of the young adults who had the three newspaper experiences said they had volunteered or done community service during the past year, compared with only 37 percent who had no newspaper experience as teens.
EXPRESSING THEMSELVES
Expressing an opinion publicly on matters of public interest is a second form of civic engagement. Eighty-four percent of those surveyed said they had engaged in some means of civic expression in their lives – writing a letter, signing a petition, attending a rally or using the power of the purse to support or reject a particular product – and 68 percent had done so in the past year.
Signing a petition about a political or social issue and boycotting a product based on disagreement with the social or political values of the producing company were the most likely forms of civic expression overall, with slightly more than 60 percent saying they had done these activities at some point. However, in terms of current activity, boycotting a product or buying something out of support for the company that produces it were the two most likely activities in the past year at 45 percent and 43 percent, respectively.
Again, young adults who used newspapers in the classroom and newspapers for homework assignments were more likely to engage in civic expression than those who did neither. Teen readership of newspapers or newspaper teen sections also increased the likelihood of continuing “voice activities” as young adults. And the 12 percent of young adults who had experienced all three of the newspaper activities – classroom, homework and teen sections – in their teen years were by far the most engaged in voice activities during the past year.
Despite the general low voter turnout for this age group, 84 percent of the young adults interviewed said they had taken part in at least one of the political activities they were asked about in the survey. The most likely activity, picked by 75 percent, was registering to vote, with the least likely activities being volunteering for a political organization or candidate (13 percent) and donating money to a candidate, party or political organization (18 percent).
One-third (32 percent) of the respondents said they had actively participated in the 2004 presidential campaign and 43 percent said they tried to convince other voters to vote for or against a particular candidate or party. Around one in four of those surveyed (27 percent) reported making their political feelings known through campaign buttons, car stickers or yard signs.
Young adults who had all three newspaper experiences as teens – classroom, homework and teen section – were more likely to engage in political activities. Their average participation rate for each of the nine activities was 45.8 percent, compared with 34.6 percent for those who had none of the newspaper experiences as teens.
Peter Levine, Ph.D, director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at the University of Maryland, says the study findings are encouraging.
“It is exciting to see that using newspapers in classrooms has a positive and lasting effect on a broad range of political and civic activities,” he says. “For the future of our democracy, we need young people to participate, and newspapers help substantially.”
Susan Clark-Johnson, president of the newspaper division of Gannett Co. in McLean, Va., and chairwoman of NAA, says she is pleased that the study identifies some actions newspapers can take to increase future readership and build a more engaged citizenry.
“While I am not surprised with the findings, I am delighted to see that this research reinforces the newspaper‘s important role in civic participation and civic responsibility,” she says. “Also, I find these data actionable on a local level, which enhances the usefulness of the research.”
The study also highlights the importance of newspaper Web sites, concluding that the use of online news sources as teens is another strong predictor of future civic engagement, particularly for those in the 25-to-29 age group. The Internet was a more dominant force for that group during high school than it was for those ages 30 to 34. Thirty-eight percent of the 25- to 29-year-olds visited online news sites as teens, compared with only 11 percent of the 30- to 34-year-olds.
“The fact that this study is a few years out and you see the big increases in online use between the two groups studied here shows that we need a lot more creative energy to attract teens online and also to the hard copy,” says Karen Brown Dunlap, Ph.D., president and managing director of The Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg. “This is a rich area. It just needs to be mined better.”
Dunlap says she thinks that more newspapers are attempting to integrate teen content into their news pages, but they are “struggling” to find the right content combination.
“Maybe that explains why we are always reading about Lindsay Lohan,” she says.
Cheryl Arvidson, a freelance writer based in Falls Church, Va., can be reached at carvidson@cox.net. 
