Growing up, I couldn't avoid newspapers. My parents' coffee table was continually littered with seemingly every publication available, sometimes in multiple languages, and on weekends my parents would pore over the news while taking in obscene amounts of coffee.
In the last decade, the Internet has emerged as the prime medium for communication and news, and far fewer kids are likely to grow up with such cluttered coffee tables. The Newspaper Association of America just released its 2005 report (based on 100 newspapers) on readership trends, showing that between February 2004 and March 2005, newspaper Web sites increased newspapers' total audience by 12 percent.
Not surprisingly, the increased online readership was most remarkable among young adults, with readership of 18- to 24-year-olds up 16 percent and that of 25- to 34-year-olds up 19 percent.
Nevertheless, college students fall into what the newspaper industry considers a difficult target group. Newspapers are practically on their hands and knees begging us to read more. The Chicago Tribune came out with its daily Red Eye publication in the hopes of drawing in a younger audience and the London Times now has a special section devoted to students.
According to NAA data, 37 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds read a newspaper on the average weekday, a figure that rises to 46 percent on an average Sunday. That still means fewer than half of young adults are reading the paper on a daily basis, even if 68 percent of young adults in the top 50 markets pick up a paper at least weekly.
UW journalism professor Dietram Scheufele said the NAA statistics did not surprise him.
"There are two things to keep in mind when looking at this historically," he said via e-mail. "First, the percentage of Americans reading newspapers began to drop in the 1940s. But for decades the population grew enough to keep circulation figures rising anyway, so newspapers didn't care much. After 1970 it remained stable and then began dropping in the 1990s. So that's the problem we're looking at now."
Scheufele also said that the type of readership has changed as a large number of people rely on news Web sites rather than print copies of newspapers.
"I often hear students tell me that they 'read the newspaper online,'" Scheufele said. "Of course, that's misleading. In most cases, online versions of newspapers do only have a subset of the articles online that appear in the print version. And the New York Times has now gone a step further and made some content available only to their paying print subscribers. That means that online reading does in fact significantly restrict the information that readers will be exposed to."
The head of UW's journalism school, Professor James Baughman, echoed Scheufele's views, noting "my sense is that most [students] don't read newspapers, except for college papers."
It's not that students rely on television or the radio for news, either: according to the NAA, fewer students watch news on television than read newspapers. Only four percent of 18- to 24-year-olds listen to National Public Radio.
More young women read Cosmopolitan (a guilty pleasure, I admit) and more young men read Maxim than Time or Newsweek, according to David T. Z. Mindich's new book "Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don't Follow the News."
Being indifferent to the news is a problem. College might be a comfortable bubble to live in for a few years, but what goes on outside of Madison genuinely matters. What does your vote mean if you don't follow the news? Last year 80 percent of Madison — a very student-oriented city — voted in the presidential elections, yet if the NAA statistics are representative, a lot of those who voted were uninformed. The two candidates had different positions on a range of important issues, such as what to do in Iraq, how to prioritize the federal budget (including funding universities) and what to do about health care and Social Security. These issues will affect all of us when we leave our bubble. How can you be indifferent to something that has a direct impact on your life?
The choice is yours. Next time you grab Cosmo or Maxim, maybe you could also snag the New York Times.
Cynthia Martens ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in Italian and European Studies.
