Naughton on young people and newspaper readership

Posted by Martin Stabe on 12 November 2006 at 20:11
Tags: BitTorrent, Flickr, Journalism, MySpace, Observer, Technorati

John Naughton’s presentation on young people’s media consumption — and specifically, lack of newspaper readership — was one of the highlights at the Society of Editors conference last week (not least because it brought about the revelation that my editor’s Sunday league football shenanigans can be viewed on YouTube).

The Observer has wisely published nearly the whole thing. Some key quotes:

[I]n any other industry, the discovery that your potential future customers weren’t interested in buying your product would prompt an investigation into whether there was something wrong with the product. But what one hears - still - from the newspaper industry is that there’s something wrong with the customers.

…

[L]ook round the average British newsroom. How many hacks have a Flickr account or a MySpace profile? How many sub-editors have ever uploaded a video to YouTube? How many editors have used BitTorrent? (How many know what BitTorrent is?)

And while some of our teenagers’ interests coincide with ours, many do not. Here, for example, are the top blog tags on Technorati last night: Bush, careers, college, comedy, Congress, death, Democrats, elections, Flickr, gay, Halloween, Iraq, Microsoft, money, Republicans, Saddam, Ted Haggard, vote, war, breaking-news, tagshare, YouTube. Some you’ll recognise. But you won’t see much about many of these in the papers.

As the blog cliché goes, go read the rest.

Tags: BitTorrent, Flickr, Journalism, MySpace, Observer, Technorati