News for a New Generation: Can It Be Fun and Functional?
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News for A New Generation: Can it Be Fun and Functional? Susan Sherr Eagleton Institute of Politics Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey [email protected] CIRCLE WORKING PAPER 29 MARCH 2005 CIRCLE Working Paper 29: March 2005 News for a New Generation: Can it be Fun and Functional? CIRCLE Working Paper 28: February News for a New Generation: Can it be Fun and Functional? INTRODUCTION programs (Pew Center for the People and the Press, 2004). However, it is far too pessimistic to assume that the only options available to young people for Considerable time and financial resources information gathering must be flawed news sources have been dedicated to increasing the numbers that do not appeal to them or comedy shows that of young people who vote in the United States. have no mandate to inform. Voting is certainly a vital component of political and civic engagement. However, there are other News media organizations have an obvious important political behaviors in which young people interest in increasing the youth audience but not have been participating in decreasing numbers and necessarily in providing young people with high at rates lower than older people. One example is quality information about politics and public affairs. news consumption. Even if 18-24 year olds begin Efforts to increase youth audiences by news voting at consistently higher rates, their relative organizations generally include providing more inattention to political information may prevent entertainment coverage, shortening the length of them from casting informed votes. news stories and adjusting formal visual features to be more consistent with “MTV Style” editing (Sherr, Many recent studies and practitioner reports CIRCLE Working Paper 16, 2004). Although it is indicate that young citizens are turning away from possible that these changes will increase the youth traditional sources of news (Mindich, 2004). In audience, they run counter to the democratic ideal addition, those between the ages of 18 and 24 of an informed citizenry. are not going on-line for news to an extent that would serve to compensate for their inattention to There is no hard and fast rule stating how newspapers and television news sources (Keeter et. much information citizens need in order to vote al. 2002). effectively. Many scholars have argued that citizens need to learn very few political facts in order to It is true that news consumption, make informed voting decisions because they can particularly of newspapers and network television rely on cues such as party affiliation to determine news, has been declining for all age groups. A which candidate will best serve their interests 2002 study by the Pew Research Center for the (Popkin, 1991; Schaffner and Streb, 2002). People and the Press demonstrated that the However, it is increasingly likely that young people percent of people who report regular reading of a are lacking sufficient understanding of national daily newspaper is down 8% since 1994. Although politics to rely even on these cognitive shortcuts. up very slightly from 2000, the percent of people This may leave people with only less reliable who reported regular network news viewing was demographic stereotypes to rely upon when making down 21% from 1987. However, young people voting decisions (McDermott, 1998 and 2005). are less likely to be regular news consumers than their elders. The same 2002 Pew study showed According to Dahl (1998) one of the that 19 percent of those under 30 watch the nightly criteria for establishing a democratic process of network news regularly compared with 53 percent government is that all voting members of the of senior citizens. democracy have “equal and effective opportunities for learning about the relevant alternative policies Certainly, there are many problems with the and their likely consequences” upon which they way traditional news sources present information. will be asked to vote (37). Even if they do Active consumption of news is not a panacea for not take advantage of these opportunities, the becoming an informed and engaged citizen. Young system requires that all citizens should be able people do report getting news about politics and to learn enough to allow them to vote in their current affairs from other sources, such as comedy interests. The paucity of political information www.civicyouth.org 2 www.civicyouth.org 3 CIRCLE Working Paper 29: March 2005 News for a New Generation: Can it be Fun and Functional? CIRCLE Working Paper 28: February News for a New Generation: Can it be Fun and Functional? aimed specifically at young adults puts them at a Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, where comparative disadvantage. we conducted the study. One hundred sixteen were male, 147 were female, and three did not In an effort to address these issues, the report their gender. The group of participants News for a New Generation Project has been consisted of 91 white subjects, 100 Asians, 39 investigating why young people are increasingly African-Americans, 21 Hispanics and 20 who said less likely to be active news consumers, what kinds they were some other race. of news is available for younger audiences, and whether there are formats for news that would be The difficulty of recruiting non-college more engaging and informative for young adults young people to participate in the study proved than current media offerings. prohibitive. So, although the study was designed to focus on 18-24 year-olds, the fact that the The first News for a New Generation participants were almost all college students does working paper described the results of analyses limit the ability to generalize to the members of conducted using three qualitative methodologies: this age group who are not in college and who have textual analysis, interviews, and focus groups. The not attended college. results indicated that both youth news producers and young people themselves had clear ideas about A check of the randomization produced no what news aimed at younger audiences should look discernable patterns in the demographic makeup like. of the four groups indicating that subjects were appropriately randomized to condition. This informed the final stage of the project; a controlled experiment designed to determine Before logging on to the Web sites, whether systematically altering the design and participants were instructed to take as much time content of a news Web site would cause people as they needed to read through the content of the between the ages of 18 and 24 to evaluate the site and be able to evaluate it. We told them that Web site more positively and to learn more from their opinions were very important to us, so we the news content. Both the design features of the hoped they would review the site thoroughly. We sites and the stories presented were aimed at decided to allow subjects the freedom to decide eliciting positive reactions from younger audiences how much of each story they wanted to read and and presenting information in a way that would whether they would read every story because facilitate learning and information retention for the this would be more representative of real-world novice news consumer. experience. We also told participants that some of the links on the site were inactive, and some of the METHOD news stories were not current, but that they should not focus on these issues when evaluating the site. We developed four Web sites to serve as the stimuli in this experiment. The experiment Subjects then had the opportunity to read consisted of a control group and three experimental through the five top stories featured on the site conditions. as well as either four news briefs or four short Subjects were randomized to each of the four satire articles. The main story topics were the gay conditions using a block randomization method marriage amendment, implementation of tolls on that ensures nearly equal groups. When federal roads, Medicare prescription drug cards, subjects logged on to their computers, they were gas prices, and outcomes of the Supreme Court immediately taken to one of the four Web sites. affirmative action decision on college campuses. A total of 266 18-24 year-olds participated in the experiment. Most were college students at We told participants that, when they were www.civicyouth.org 2 www.civicyouth.org 3 CIRCLE Working Paper 29: March 2005 News for a New Generation: Can it be Fun and Functional? CIRCLE Working Paper 28: February News for a New Generation: Can it be Fun and Functional? finished reading through the site, they should click on a link at the bottom of the site that would allow The purpose of this manipulation was to them to access the post-test questionnaire. The increase positive evaluations among participants link became active after ten minutes, ensuring that by presenting stories in a context they would find participants spent at least some time reviewing the familiar and providing cues that the content was site. The questionnaire asked a series of questions created for their age group. We also hypothesized evaluating subjects’ literacy level, political that learning would be facilitated through the use knowledge, political engagement, opinions of the of language that young people understand and site, and how much they learned from reading situations that they find familiar. the articles on the site. See Appendix One for a complete list of questions. The second experimental condition (n=64) presented the same text as the control group but WEB SITES surrounded it with a youthful design. The heading of the site depicts the top of a young man’s head We designed four Web sites for the with his eyes staring provocatively at the viewer. experiment, one to serve as a control and three The site is multi-colored and has moving ads as experimental sites.