Radical plan to woo youth to newspapers

Article tools

	PRINT ARTICLE
	SEND TO FRIEND

Services

	Subscribe to newsletters		Feeds
	Become a Facebook fan		Follow Moneyweb on twitter

What would you give up: the fridge or the decoder?

Subscribers are proving to be media...

Corporate twits crack down on tweets

Be careful about what you say.

But the problem is not the medium; it's relevancy.

EAST LONDON - The French youth, it seems, are giving up on newspapers at such an alarming rate that last week the government announced a radical plan to bring them back into the fold: it is spending millions of euros to give 18 to 24 year olds across the country free subscriptions to 59 publications from Le Monde and Le Figaro to the global edition of The New York Times.

Mon dieu! That the state cares about the newspaper industry enough to subsidise such a project (the newspapers must provide the papers for free and the government will pay for the distribution) seems rather stunning from South Africa, where one gets the distinct feeling that our ruling elite secretly believe they could rather do without the pesky press.

If you've ever had to elicit answers out of a government spokesman, you'll know that since the advent of the Mbeki era most are at best shambolic; at worst completely evasive. "Well, you'll have to send an e-mail," is the mantra, followed a while later by: "We have no comment."

Every now and again the view that the media in South Africa needs to step away from the Western tradition of an adversarial Fourth Estate rears its head. We need to find our own African way, it is said. And this is not solely from ANC apparatchiks but also from journalism academics.

By and large, African media is not setting much of an example. A former colleague who attended Wits University's conference on investigative journalism last week told me that at an awards ceremony for gumshoe hacks across the continent, the flavour of the month seemed to be tobacco smuggling in West Africa. You'd think that the fact that most of West Africa is run by oligarchs would occupy the pages of their papers.

So, yes indeed, the British and American tradition of nailing the bastards for corruption and double-talk is a fine one - and in the more far-flung provinces of our land like the Eastern Cape where I live, the press is often all that stands between the citizens and the kleptocrats in the provincial government.

And this, it appears, is at the heart of the young people of France losing interest in reading papers. Many view the French press with suspicion and, according to a report in The Guardian earlier this year, the French have little respect for their newspapers "in a climate where politicians rewrite their own interviews for publication and the president's powerful business friends, from construction to arms manufacturing, own several major papers or TV stations".

Just as well we're not emulating the Gallic tradition then.

Research across the world shows that Generation Y and those teens that will follow them are not the vacuous, multimedia-obsessed crew they are often made out to be. Research by Nielsen released in June this year shows that young people do in fact read newspapers, spend less time surfing the Net than adults, are not abandoning TV for new media and are far more likely than adults to use one media at a time.

Young South Africans featured in the report for spending far more time watching TV than other nations - an average of five hours a day compared with US teenagers, for instance, who watch an average of three hours and 20 minutes. But that may well have something to do with the fact that our teens stay at home more, under the watchful eye of their parents who fear for their safety out on the streets.

The young South African's enormous appetite for television is borne out by the latest AMPS figures, which found an increase in young males between the ages of 18 and 24 watching TV.

But then the major trend of last year's AMPS figures was a heartening growth in young people reading newspapers and magazines. Print titles were read by 63% of young people in 2008 compared with 58% in the previous year. Put that in your posh Parisian pipe and smoke it!

The move in France, where newspaper readership among young people is particularly low (10% of those aged 15 to 24 read a paid-for newspaper every day in 2007 compared with 20% a decade earlier), seems to have taken off. Already 30 000 have signed up for free newspapers through a pre-registration drive and it will be very interesting to see if there is any real change over the long term.

But one has to wonder if this bold experiment is really just shouting against the wind. Internationally, the consensus is that young people are consuming less news in any form of media.

The Nielsen report found that teens' favourite categories while online are general interest portals and searches (which is the same for older users) but that social networking such as Facebook also ranks extremely high.

It's most likely that the French newspapers are not writing about things that interest young people - that the problem is not the medium but relevancy.

So what are we doing better in South Africa than in France?

I think that most newspapers here do cover issues that the youth care about and this is probably because we have many young reporters in our newsrooms.

This leads to oft-heard lament in journalism circles of what is termed the "juniorisation" of newsrooms but these 20-something reporters bring stories to the table that interest their peers. And under the guidance of a smart news editor, they can be crafted into stories that are compelling to the youth as well as older readers. I also suspect young readers rather approve of seeing the press nail the bastards.

So, no, Generation Y is not some strange impenetrable beast. Not in South Africa anyway because we've already got a dialogue going with them in the media - if not in your lounge.

*Media columnist Gill Moodie spent 14 years as a salaried hack in print media in South Africa and the UK before escaping to the blogosphere and freelance journalism. She is the publisher of Grubstreet http://grubstreet.co.za/ in between unpacking and packing the infernal dishwasher and bringing up a four-year-old with attitude.