With So Many Media Choices Facing the Young, How Do You Get Them to Spend Time Reading the Newspaper?
Apart From Giving Them Something They Want to Read, Mum and Dad Need to Crack the Whip

Philip M. Stone March 30, 2005

A major new survey on the media habits of American kids shows newspaper reading almost at the bottom of their priorities. But kids spend more time reading if they live in homes where parents enforce strict rules about how much time can be spent watching television or downloading music. There’s a marketing message for newspaper publishers if ever there was one!

Global trends show newspaper circulation dropping annually, and perhaps just as worrying the demographics show the age of readers is rising– the young are staying away. Many explanations are available – the free tabloids, newspapers have so much content they have become a turn-off, they don’t carry news the young want, etc. etc.  -- but a survey by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation shows the problem in a far more competitive light – there are so many media options for the young today, and newspapers just are plain not competitive.

The survey, following a similar one completed six years ago, tells just how competitive it is to get the time of the 8 – 18 year-old.  Of 13 media options the young have daily, reading a newspaper scores 11th. Number 1 by far is watching television, and second, somewhat surprisingly, is listening to the radio. In between come listening to pre-recorded music, using a computer, playing video games and the like. And kids multitask quite a bit – they’ll play a video game while listening to their MP3. Their least popular media activity taken as a whole is reading!

But within that gloomy reading for publishers is this key finding: While the majority of young people say their parents do not impose rules about their TV watching, in those homes where there are such rules about half of the time they would have watched television was spent instead reading. And other surveys have shown if you can get the kids while they are young they will continue to read newspapers as they get older. It’s the young generation that traditional newspapers lost at home over the past 10-20 years that today, as commuters, opt for the free tabloid. 

For reasons not clear parents curb computer usage more than television. That may be because so many homes still dial into the Internet rather than use ADSL so cost might be a factor, but whatever the reason, the trick is to get those kids to take the time they would have spent on such restricted activities to instead read the family daily newspaper delivered at home.

So, newspaper marketing campaigns are the order of the day to get Mum and Dad actively trying to direct their kids on how they spend their media hours. But if the campaign works, do newspapers provide what kids want?  That goes back to why the free tabloids are successful and it’s not just the right price.

Newspapers are learning that if they want the young audience they need to do things different. For instance, with the advent of phone cameras,  kids would love nothing more than taking pictures of their friends, and their activities, and being able to send those pictures and messages via sms to a newspaper and seeing them published not just on the newspaper web site but in print, too. But do they get to see that? Some of the new tabloids, clued into what kids want,  are starting to do that, but not the mainstream press.

That brings us to another trip down memory lane – all too often the media in its quest to do things differently has forgotten what has worked in the past.  This writer was a teenager in the 1960s, living in southern California some 50 miles (80km) from Los Angeles. The local daily newspaper had a big problem: how could it – a one-section afternoon newspaper -- compete with the huge, multi-sectioned Los Angeles Times, even that far from Los Angeles. Sound familiar – in today’s world it’s how do you get people back to reading huge multi-sectioned newspapers instead of relying just on the Internet or the free tabloid?

The local daily newspaper was a bit of a joke – it’s name was The Daily Report but its nickname in the community was the Daily Repeat because so much of its news copy came from the Associated Press which in turn picked up the bulk of its southern California news from, you guessed it, that morning’s Los Angeles Times. Management had to find a niche – and coverage of boring local city council meetings was not doing it.  But management understood the one thing that brought families together in small communities was school activities, and none more so than the sports activities of those schools.

In this case it meant covering the local high school sports as if they were major league. Lots of stories and pictures of the high school heroes preparing for the twice-a -week games, long stories covering the games, plenty of sidebars, etc. etc. In the Los Angeles Times the only coverage was one agate line giving the game result!

That local sports coverage got the attention of the young who wanted to read about their friends and see their pictures, and it gave the local newspaper an edge over the monolith down the road. Going one step further, the newspaper even hired local high school newspaper reporters at a paltry 10-cents-a-word and no travel expense account to cover the games (and yes, that is how this author first broke into professional journalism).

The lessons learned there are no different than what is true today. Look at a European newspaper and there is hardly any coverage at all of school activities, especially their sporting events. Newspapers seemed concerned just with the major leagues.  Yet it is local activities that sell, especially to the young. And coverage of the city’s professional team is not local enough  -- newspapers need to cover what the young watch and do, too, and if they can participate in some of their own reporting then so much the better.

When this author was a UPI salesman in Indiana in the 1980s it always amazed him at how many small local communities supported a daily newspaper and a local radio station. But read the newspaper, listen to the radio and it was obvious how they commercially prospered -- they covered mostly local news and they emphasized that news with which all the family could identify – the schools.

And the news agencies understood that, too. In the US it is the state news wires that are the bread and butter of media subscribers. If in those days the UPI Indiana wire did not have complete high school sports coverage then it would not have sold. And that comes from the guy who sold it!

Indeed, one reason why Reuters declined to buy UPI when it had the opportunity in the 1980s – and thus gave up becoming a true competitor to the Associated Press on its own turf – was because Reuters feared it would become mired in such parochial coverage. And it would have been.

In Europe newspapers and news agencies will scoff that type of local coverage is far too parochial. Maybe, but there are lessons to be learned:  First, being parochial works. Second, if you can’t be parochial then still write about what the young are interested in – their entertainment and sports idols – and involve them in what you are trying to produce for them.  How many newspapers out there have a youth advisory board suggesting the coverage the newspaper should have for their age group? . You think your 20,30,40, 50 year-old editors know that?

Having said all of that, it still doesn’t hurt to have Mum and Dad crack the whip when it comes to cutting down on watching TV and surfing the net.