Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Following up on last week’s post about how the upcoming NEA study will show — despite everyone being, er, wild about Harry Potter — that kids aren’t reading more, The New York Times today reports that apathy in terms of teen reading isn’t restricted to just books. Teenagers aren’t reading newspapers, either. Juston Jones, in a story entitled “Young Adults Are Giving Newspapers Scant Notice,” writes that “With the United States military fighting a protracted war in Iraq and a wide-open presidential campaign already making headlines daily, Americans of all ages are interested in current affairs and are consuming news like never before, right? Not so, especially not teenagers and young adults, according to a report released last week…”

The report, entitled “Young People and News” (click here for a PDF) was “based on a national sample of 1,800 Americans that included teenagers, young adults aged 18 to 30 and older adults.” What the study found (among other things) was 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. That compared with 35 percent of adults over 30. Furthermore, despite the popular belief that young people are flocking to the Internet, the survey found that teenagers and young adults were twice as likely to get daily news from television than from the Web.”

Of course, the fact that teens get their news from TV doesn’t mean they’re not flocking to the Web; it’s now the place where they spend most of their time. It shows that — while they’re online — news is not something they care about or seek out. Instead, they’re spending hours upon hours on MySpace, YouTube and Facebook. Towards the end of the article, Thomas Patterson, “a professor of government and the press at Harvard who conducted the survey” says “My sense is that, like it or not, the future of news is going to be in the electronic media, but we don’t really know what that form is going to look like.” So if the future of news is going to be in the “electronic media,” I think that many other areas of publishing — including magazines and books — will be similarly digital. And if it’s not, we just might lose an entire generation of readers.