Newsroom With A View

(Originally posted on June 9, 2010)

AJR boils down a Pew report on Millenials, those people born after 1980, and looks at the implications for news organizations. Relevant highlights:

“Millennials are the best-educated generation in history. Fifty-four percent of today’s 18- to 28-year-olds have had at least some college education, compared with 49 percent of Gen Xers, 36 percent of Boomers and 24 percent of the Silent Generation (age 65-plus) when they were the same age. While younger people are historically less likely to vote in political elections, in 2008 the gap between voters over and under 30 was the narrowest it’s been since 1972, when 18-year-olds were granted the right to vote.”

“Slightly more of them cite television as their main source of news, at 65 percent, with the Internet in second place at 59 percent. … Of those who cited television, 43 percent said they get most of their news from cable news, only 18 percent from the major networks and 16 percent from local TV. Only 24 percent said they got most of their news from newspapers. In a separate Pew study released in March, 35 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds said they follow the news most or all of the time. That’s a smaller percentage than older generations, but still seems kind of impressive.”

The main point of the article appears to be to try to jostle some of the traditionalists out of the idea that these young people will ever become more like our traditional readers (subscribers) and viewers, citing that 83 percent say they SLEEP WITH THEIR CELL PHONES and that “This is a generation that identifies technology use as the main difference between itself and other generations.” Unfortunately, the article comes no closer than any others to coming up with the answer to, “Now what?”