A new survey about teens and news consumption brings
to mind a well-worn question: Is the glass half full or half empty?
If
you're an optimist, you'll find comfort in learning that a majority of
teenagers -- though a bare 51 percent -- get mainstream news on the
Internet at least weekly.
That's according to a
new survey [PDF] funded by the
John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
of 15,000 high school students. Although there is a substantial body of
research about the news habits of young adults, this is one of the
first about high school students. You can find more about the results
here and
here.
The survey helps disprove the generalization that teenagers aren't plugged into the news, said Lee Rainie, director of the
Pew Internet and American Life Project.
"The
notion is that no young person cares about the news, and that is
wrong," he said. "They're moving to a different distribution mechanism."
The survey shows that 66 percent of students who consume online news rely on aggregators like
Google or
Yahoo! -- portals to mainstream newspapers and television stations.
"It's traditional news sources even though it's through nontraditional channels," Rainie said in a telephone interview.
That
may provide some relief to an industry scrambling to keep up with a
changing media environment. But it doesn't ensure that students are
well-informed, said David Mindich, a journalism professor at Saint
Michael's College and the author of
"Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don't Follow the News."
With
newspapers or television broadcasts, journalists decide what news is
most important. Internet portals, however, enable users to tailor the
news to their own interests.
"There's really no guarantee that
you're going to find what you need to have a well-rounded political
awareness," Mindich said in a telephone interview.
Even
mainstream online news sources allow users to navigate by way of the
most e-mailed or most popular stories of the day. Typically, the most
popular stories aren't the top political stories, Mindich said.
"I
would certainly need to ask more questions than the survey provides,"
he said, "such as the extent to which young people are getting enough
political information to make them informed citizens and powerful
voters."
Mindich doubts they're getting enough. His research and
Pew Research Center studies have shown that young Americans don't fare well with questions assessing their political knowledge.
For
example, a 2004 Pew survey asked for the name of the presidential
candidate who was a general. About 40 percent of older Americans knew
it was Wesley Clark. Only about 12 percent of young adults knew the
answer.
But what news students are reading -- and how
much time they're spending with news -- are questions for next year's
survey, said Eric Newton, director of the Knight Foundation's
Journalism Initiatives. Newton responded to questions for this article
by e-mail.
The survey, released today, is part of the
Knight Foundation's "2006 Future of the First Amendment" study. Its reported margin of
error is plus or minus one percent for the students and plus or minus
3.6 percent for the teachers. Additional details about the study's
methodology can be found on page nine of the attached PDF:
Knight Foundation study. You can answer the survey questions yourself
here.
Regardless of what news teens are looking at online, Mindich said he finds the survey results encouraging.
"I think the more young people do look at news on the Internet, the more they'll look at political news," he said.
Yet
with the popularity of news aggregators comes another concern: Are
students looking at the headline and first paragraph produced by Google
and calling it a day? Or, are they clicking the link to read more?
News organizations continually wrestle with how Internet portals affect their online readership, said
Howard Finberg, Poynter's director of interactive learning and the leader of yearly Poynter conferences on media consumption.
"Having that link on Yahoo! news -- does that help me or does it hurt me?" he said in an interview. "No one knows."
Another question for another survey, perhaps.
But
what about the 49 percent of teens who aren't getting online news at
least once a week? Twenty-nine percent say they never get news online.
"It's
distressing," Finberg said. "That has serious consequences beyond the
economic models that support journalism. It has serious consequences
for society. It has consequences for democracy."
The survey
specifically looks at online news consumption. It doesn't try to
measure how much students get news from other sources, such as
television and radio broadcasts, and newspapers.
It does show,
however, that the majority of students think television is the best
overall source of news, the most accurate and the easiest to use.
Other surveys have gone further to study the consumption of traditional news sources. A
March 2005 Kaiser Family Foundation survey
of daily media consumption habits also showed that television is the
primary media for young Americans. Yet only about 6 percent of the
average three hours they watched each day was devoted to the news.
The
survey found that young people spend little time with print news
sources. Of 43 minutes spent reading outside of school, students
surveyed spent an average of six minutes reading newspapers.
"I
think it's always been true that younger people are less likely to be
news consumers than older people," Rainie said. "It's a consistent,
generational story."
Ten percent of teens surveyed by the Knight
Foundation said they have no interest in the news, mostly because they
feel it isn't presented in an engaging way.
That's up to news organizations to recognize and address, Finberg said.
"We
have to find ways to connect with them now," he said. "Let's not shove
a 1950s newspaper report down every young person's throat and say that
it's good for you like cod liver oil."
____________________
EDITORS' NOTE: The Knight Foundation and the Poynter Institute are partners in
News University, an interactive learning service financed by Knight and directed by Poynter's Howard Finberg.
