Can A Newseum Visit Convince A 30-Year-Old To Start Reading Newspapers Again?

Philip M. Stone March 24, 2009

Among the problems newspapers continually struggle to resolve is how to convince 30-something readers to return to print. Skewing news towards them hasn’t seemed to work, even employing Internet-type navigation aids hasn’t done the trick. So how about a visit to the Newseum?

Regular readers to this column will remember how this writer has tried in vain to get his 31-year-old son living in Orlando to read his local newspaper, The Sentinel. He has been offered it, and USAToday free of charge but Kevan still won’t read them. He says it has nothing to do with the cost, it has nothing to do with dead tree ecology,  but it has everything to do with the fact the Internet satisfies his needs for fast, accurate, local news far better than his local print read.

He’s an avid fan of University of Central Florida’s (UCF) sports, yet he says he gets all he needs on that from ESPN via cable and on the web, far superior, he says, to the coverage available in The Sentinel. Now that either says a lot for ESPN, or not much for The Sentinel, or it’s something in between, but the fact is he still isn’t reading print.

He is also trying his luck on the stock market so he’s an avid CNBC fan and he is into news but for him that means MSNBC and other cable news channels. Note, no newspapers there!

Recently, however,  he made a trip to Washington DC and the first place he went to visit was the Newseum. Could this be the breakthrough? Could this get him back on the path of righteousness? In Kevan Stone’s own words:

“A couple weeks ago I had a chance to visit the Smithsonian Museum of Media, better known by its appropriate name, the Newseum.  It occupies a prime piece of real estate on Pennsylvania Avenue, with a breathtaking view of Washington from its top floor terrace.

Being the son of a journalist, I have keen interest in the history and future of media, and was quite anxious to see what the Newseum had to offer.  What I took away from my experience was not as much a history lesson, but rather a glimpse into the future of media, both print and digital.

There was no shortage of actual newspapers scaling centuries of events, with a significant amount of dedication given to the print industry.  Equally, there was substantial space given to broadcast journalism as well as digital media, from the internet and technology to blogs.  The mere building and the exhibits themselves give an accurate and passionate view of media’s past, but, perhaps more important, it also conceded the future trends of the industry.

The initial exhibits contained scores of newspapers that were incredibly interesting, as they obviously were to the scores of middle and upper aged patrons lingering in that section. That observation cannot be lost.  As anybody over the age of 35 will tell you, there was no Internet when they were kids.  When they began to watch television, CNN was not yet on the air. 

People then were simply indoctrinated into the popular media culture, the morning (or evening edition) newspaper.  This was an American way of life.  How else, other than 30 minute news shows on a network affiliate, or the occasional news brief on their daily commute, was one able to learn that there was political unrest in a foreign country?  My point is that repetition builds habit.  These are the people that still to this day use the newspaper for their information.  There have been many studies that show the older the age group, the less technologically inclined they are when it comes to phenomenon like the internet.

Moving towards the end of the museums exhibits, it brought us toward the “present and future” segments.  The future, however, was dominated by youth.  One could watch as the eight-year old Boy Scout seamlessly interacted on the computer exhibits.  Another college student went from blog to blog site with the greatest of ease.  Even the young parent with his kids would watch as they recorded their own live mock news broadcast.  This was the future media audience, and they had no interest in picking up a paper, but rather surfing the web at light speed. 

The building itself had a monstrous scrolling marquee within its walls, updating the news of the day; news that was happening in real-time.  If the visitors wanted to read all about it in a newspaper, they would have to wait until tomorrow! I’m quite sure I can speak for those youngsters when I say I’ll go the route of real time news for free on the plethora of news outlets a keyboard away.

As I exited the museum, I came to realize what I had always told my journalist father many times over the year (and on this website), that the future of news lies on the thread of real-time and anytime accessibility.  We have come a ways from the telegraph and radio to television and finally into the digital age.  Nobody can question the advancements made in the way news is given to the public. 

Are media companies doomed?  Certainly not!  Is the current print business model secure?  Absolutely not!  Newspaper companies must adjust to the new realities, particularly remembering their older reader base is slowly dwindling as the years go on. This is the world we live in. 

Technology has given us a tremendous improvement in our quality of life.  As in any industry, products evolve with the times.  The newspaper industry is no different but those changes must come soon. I have been able to witness this evolution and it is obvious and inevitable to me that technology will prevail. Unless there are big changes soon, print will become only what you find in most history museums…..an artifact.”

Well, there’s some pretty serious stuff in there, but the bottom line is the Newseum convinced him more than ever that newspapers really do belong in a museum – they are little more than relics of the past – and it was the older patrons who seemed most interested in those relics. Also, there could be no doubt the future belongs to digital – that’s where the younger visitors gathered – and it is not the future, rather it is now.

Which brings this column back to preaching what it has been for some time – the only way to get someone like Kevan to read the newspaper is for that newspaper to contain information that he really wants and that he can’t get elsewhere. That means that print and the Web need to work together to complement one another. It means the breaking news – or in his case – the breaking sports scores and the game stories probably belong on the Internet, but that in-depth interview with the coach, or the star players – that stuff belongs in print only or if it goes on the Internet then it is behind lock and key for subscribers only.

Of course, that is all predicated whether news organizations still have enough local journalists to provide that enterprise reporting – exclusive interviews and the like – or whether they are so few now that they only have time to post game stories and results.

TheSentinel should make contact with Kevan and use him as the guinea pig on what to do to get back to print that younger reader. Already they know it means producing enough copy that can’t be found on the Internet for free that would persuade him to share his time between print and the Internet.

If they can’t crack that particular nut, if they no longer have the human tools to do that, then they can forget about the young. And as Kevan mentioned, their older readers are dying off, so who will be left to read newspapers?