Survey Says
An ongoing international study is taking an in-depth look at youth readership.
By Lisa Scheid
MARINA HENDRICKS
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Conference attendees listen intently as translations are provided in several languages.
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An international study on declining youth readership of newspapers aims to move beyond symptoms and not only explore the root causes, but also propose strategies for reversing the trend, a researcher said at the World Young Reader Conference.
The Canadian firm D-Code is conducting the multiphase study. D-Code has already performed a secondary research review of 140 different studies, reports, academic papers, articles and blogs covering six continents.
D-Code anticipated finishing the second phase this spring. That phase was to include establishing an advisory board, conducting exploratory qualitative research in 10 countries and designing a methodology. Phase two was focusing on young people ages 14 to 25 from the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, Sweden, Serbia, Lebanon, South Africa, Colombia, the Philippines and Japan.
Robert Barnard, founder and partner of D-Code, shared the following insights from the research to date at the conference.
- Youth see the value and benefit of being well-informed.
- Young people get their local and international news from multiple sources and technologies.
- The time squeeze is forcing multitasking and more competition.
- Social networks (MySpace.com, Facebook.com) are playing an important role.
- Youth are rapidly developing the skills to become content providers.
- Exploration and communication are important to young people at this stage in their lives.
- Youth show growing suspicion of advertising influence on editorial products.
- Trust in the newspaper format remains, but trust in news may be waning.
- Youth have an awareness of government/corporate control and hidden agendas.
- Television is still the top source for information, but the Internet is building fast.
- Youth gravitate to global non-newspaper brands, such as the BBC, Yahoo! and CNN.
- Cell phones are jumping in popularity over online newspapers.
Barnard also presented some hypotheses on which the ongoing study seems to shed light.
Hypothesis:
Parents, teachers and friends inspire newspaper reading.
Finding:
The primary influencers are parents.
Hypothesis
: Free newspapers take readers away from paid newspapers.
Finding:
Free newspapers drive curiosity and inspire youth to dig deeper.
Hypothesis:
Youth have no news rituals.
Finding:
They do have rituals. In general, these are reading the newspaper in the morning, going online throughout the day, and possibly reading the newspaper and mostly watching TV at night. Weekdays focus on urgent information and weekends focus on debate and culture.
In the United States, D-Code plans to conduct a national Internet-based survey of 1,000 youth ages 15 to 29 as well as in-depth interviews or focus groups. Once D-Code has completed a number of similar studies in countries around the world, an international comparison report will be created.
Lisa Scheid, editor of Voices at the Reading (Pa.) Eagle, can be reached at 610.371.5043 or lscheid@readingeagle.com.
