16 July 2007

Kids to Print Media: Well . . . Duh

Some years ago, while at a magazine industry conference, I sat at a breakfast table with a bright young man who worked for a wholesaler.

“Within 15 years,” BYM said, there won’t be any newspapers.”

“Sure there will,” I said. “We just don’t know what form they’ll take.”

As it turns out we both may be proven right.

The New York Times reports that “Only 16 percent of the young adults surveyed aged 18 to 30 said that they read a newspaper every day and 9 percent of teenagers said that they did.”

This and a lot more depressing stuff comes out of a paper, “Young People and News” released by Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

While newspapers and, by extension, magazines (oh, say for instance Jane) matter less to that perpetually perplexing group known as “The Kids,” portable media do matter. When print magazines and newspapers finally go to that great parrot cage in the sky, their digital counterparts may well be going strong in whatever device takes its place beside the iPod and iPhone.

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