Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 2 | Abandoning the News, page 3

A Time For Radical Thinking
In a world where national leaders are turning away from the news media, citizens have an increasing lack of confidence in the press and young people are moving perhaps permanently away from traditional newsgathering organizations, a radical rethinking of how news is delivered seems necessary—even overdue. Press watchers and public figures have varying, though often critical views on the performance of the national press, and many critics claim that new forms of citizen or Internet media can help fix general media inadequacies and gaping holes in coverage of important issues. Nevertheless, many feel that the country still needs strengthened newsgathering capabilities to help Americans develop a true understanding of an increasingly complex world, and argue that only strong, national media organizations cover wars, elections, news from around the world and in metropolitan communities in ways that help inform large numbers of citizens.

Efforts to stave off what seem like catastrophic times ahead for the news business and its deteriorating relationship with young news consumers are already underway. Some examples:

• Mainstream news services, after the traditional news industry's usual angst about new products and threats to core values, have begun to embrace weblogs (or blogs), the interactive, constantly updated web pages now so widespread online. Acceptance of blogging went so far this year that NBC News actually hired bloggers to comment during election night coverage.

• An increasing number of younger anchors and reporters, some with web backgrounds, are showing up on television news programs. CNN 's Anderson Cooper is positioned for the younger audience, ABC News correspondent Jake Tapper is a former Salon.com writer, and Slate.com contributes regularly to National Public Radio.

• The distribution challenge only gets more complex with time, but new means for reaching new audiences continue to develop. For instance, through MobiTV, a product available from Sprint and other cellular carriers, subscribers can now watch programs from NBC News and MSNBC cable on their cell phones. Throughout Europe, giant cellular carrier Vodaphone is now offering Vodaphone live!, providing video from television services ITN in the United Kingdom, N24 in Germany, Rai News in Italy and El Mundo in Spain.

Despite these innovations, some experts still warn that the news business—and with it, perhaps, the nation itself—faces a troubled future. As David Mindich, author of Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don't Follow the News (Oxford University Press, 2004) concluded in a recent interview on an industry web site that today's young citizens “are still just as thoughtful, intelligent—and I would argue, literate—as ever before. What has changed is that young people no longer see a need to keep up with the news.” Says Mindich in his recent book: “America is facing the greatest exodus of informed citizenship in its history.”

The Challenge:
Retaining Audiences
While Building New Ones
At its essence, the conclusions of the Magid survey support much of what many researchers and careful students of the media have been saying and raises a set of dramatic red flags about newsgathering in the 21st century. One such scholar, Betsy Frank, Executive Vice President, Research and Planning, Viacom's Cable Networks, Film and Publishing, is a preeminent researcher and thinker about young people and media use and calls them “media actives.” The media revolution, she says, “affects so many aspects of their lives and news just happens to be one of them. Nothing we see in their comfort with technology will go away as they get older. They have no loyalty to media institutions like their parents did.”

Similarly, CBS News President Andrew Heyward says that young people are “information impressionists. News is gathered by the impressions they receive from many sources around them.” How news executives today deal with the ways news is consumed, in the form of an image here, an instant message there, a cell phone text message headline, a web portal story or a newspaper shoved into a passing hand while racing to the bus, will say a great deal about the future of news as we know it.

For Heyward and other media executives interviewed for this report, the challenge is real. Whether it is thinking about the recrafting of the CBS Evening News in the post-Dan Rather-era or how to distribute CBS news content on new and evolving platforms Heyward, for example, says he's constantly thinking about ways to engage younger viewers. “We are going to have to be accessible without just being bite-sized,” he says. “We are way behind in translating the strengths of television to the new media. We are nowhere on storytelling for the new media and for these younger audiences. We have to figure out how to use the new technologies in ways that address our strengths—immediacy and personality. There is a broader, new definition of news that we will need to develop for this next generation.”

History suggests that news products tailored to meet the emerging needs of different times and different generations is not a far-fetched idea. Business coverage, for example, an afterthought in many newspapers until the 1980s and 90s, now gets vastly more attention from most news organizations than in previous eras. But perhaps an even more pressing concern, beyond simply beefing up coverage in one category or another or adding younger faces to a network newscast, is whether approaches to stories and prevailing traditions can really change. Can storytelling evolve to add more interactivity, citizen participation, inclusion of younger newsmakers and the use of music, innovative pacing and more engaging graphic and presentation elements? These changes—which represent many once widely observed taboos against embellishing straight news in any way—are at the core of what many in the business wrestle with today.

Progress toward those new definitions of news and public affairs may have been accelerated by the unpredictability and unexpected developments that were the media and new technology story underpinning last November's general election. The 2004 campaign provided any number of examples—both anecdotal and from the research already available—about the impact of the revolution at hand and how it engaged young news consumers. Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean built his campaign on connecting young Internet-savvy activists and both the ultimate Democratic nominee, Senator John Kerry, and the Republican victor, President George W. Bush, used the Internet as a critical part of their public relations and fundraising efforts, strategies directed largely at young people. Campaign commentary and coverage from bloggers moved from being perceived as idiosyncratic and away from the mainstream to being a critical part of the debate about the CBS News reporting on President Bush's military record and ultimately, the blogging phenomenon reached the level of attention that comes with a cover story in The New York Times Magazine. From a more concrete point of view:

• The Pew Internet and American Life Project determined that among 18-to-34-year-olds with high-speed Internet access, 40 percent said the Internet was their main campaign news source, twice the percentage that cited newspapers. The Pew Center also reported that 21 percent of all Americans identified the Internet as their main campaign news source, twice the percentage as in the 2000 election.

• A study of 18-to-29-year-olds carried out as part of “Declare Yourself, ” a national nonpartisan effort to register voters for last year's election, reported that 25 percent of young voters named the Internet as the first or second most important source for news compared to just 15 percent for newspapers. In that same study, Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show on the Comedy Central network was identified as the most trusted of the TV anchors among the group that chose the Internet as their top news source, while among the entire group, Stewart tied with then-NBC anchor Tom Brokaw and came in ahead of ABC's Peter Jennings and former CBS anchor Dan Rather when asked about who they “trust the most” to provide “information about politics and politicians.”

Next page: It is widely believed that this election year data represents, in some ways, a sea change in both consumption patterns and in how news is consumed.

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