Why are people still surprised when a new report comes out and says young people do not relate to print?
One of the latest was a report from the Carnegie-Knight Task Force on the Future of Journalism Education.
It found that 57% teachers use online news in the classroom with some frequency.
In the words of one of the teachers:
Students do not relate to newspapers at all, any more than they would to vinyl records
This is hardly breaking news. It is a trend which will continue and intensify. Young people are not suddenly going to wake up one morning and think, I should go out and get a paper newspaper.
Getting the news online is just more convenient for a generation who lives life online.
As Howard Owens says on his blog, maybe one day a little girl will pick up an old historical newspaper at a garage sale and ask, “Daddy, what’s this?”
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By using the “newspaper / vinyl records” analogy I think the author missed a fairly significant point, yes technology is allowing us to retrieve our news in different means, but the multi-focus news format was fading before Tim Berners-Lee developed HTML.
It’s not print we’ve moved away from, if anything ‘we’ type and write more than ‘we’ did just twenty years ago, it’s not even paper that we’re moving away from as — perversely — we print almost everything we read online (at least in the offices and newsrooms I’ve worked in). It’s specifically multi-focussed newspapers and newsmagazines that are rapidly being marginalized, and I believe it has a lot more to do with the ‘bias’ concept than any new technologies.
The idea of an “unbiased” newspaper was a relatively new construct, developed in the mid-20th century. But people towards the mid-80′s started looking for that bias again. The online news craze has been pushed and fed entirely by people searching out other people who share their bias, something they can’t find in multi-focussed newspapers or newsmagazines. It wasn’t the technology driving people to new format news during the 90′s and today, it was the lack of commonality readers had with the daily newspapers.
The web-based technologies aren’t replacing the printed word, if anything it’s expanding the use of the written language. If the opposite were true then companies would be publishing fewer catalogues, not issuing more. There are also more magazines available today then there were twenty years ago, and there are more books being published, not less. It’s just those news magazines and books are becoming more focussed and are no longer afraid to have opinions and biases.
Billboards, catalogues, magazines and/or newspapers, print’s not going anywhere. It’s just now there are options and the technology makes it easier for people to publish and share their confusing, mostly badly written, opinions.
Have some faith, even with the advent of the iPhone, we’re not dinosaurs yet.