Youth and the Media: Appealing to a New Generation

Today I attended "The Future of News Media, In Their Words: Teens as Media Consumers and Predictors," a City Club of Cleveland forum. The program was the final in a four-part series about the future of media and featured three high school and college-aged panelists' opinions and predictions of where mainstream media must go to appeal to younger consumers. Because it featured an open question-and-answer period, the discussion had a chance to go interesting places and the audience members, each with their own agenda, brought up some thought-provolking questions.

The panel itself was an articulate group of "teens." In fact, to my knowledge, only one (maybe two) of the participants were actually teens. Two of the panel members were majoring in Communication/Media-related fields and worked in college news media. As one audience member aptly pointed out, their opinions and answers are far from generalizable to the mainstream youth population. From a research standpoint what we learned at this forum wouldn't even equal the validity of a qualitative study, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't valuable information. A few trends emerged in the panelists responses to a multitude of questions.

Youth consumers prefer brevity.

These youth all expressed a need to get their information quickly and on the go. One member of the panel criticized television news as "taking too long to deliver the information." Their preferred method of media consumption was in print and online. These panelists prefer to read short media briefs online and then research whatever aspects of the news interest them by searching other media sites and websites for further information. As opposed to a more traditional preference for all the information you need contained in one source, they expressed a desire to know a little about a lot instead of a lot about one subject. They discussed MTV news shorts (remember Kurt Loder?) and breaking news blurbs as being important to them.