The Kids Today
In 2010, it’s a cliche to say “it’s a cliche to say ‘it’s a cliche to say that the media landscape is undergoing a fundamental upheaval.'” We all know it, we’re all living it daily. In big and small ways, the way we seek and receive news, information, and entertainment looks different from even last year. It’s beyond truism at this point.
As Old Journalism struggles to understand New Journalism, it has bumped up against the Web philosophy that to be successful you must understand your audience, and it doesn’t entirely know what to make of it. The fact that this is a news flash reflects less on journalism as a whole than on how some people practice it — any good writer, of any kind, anywhere, knows that you have to understand your audience — but the naivete that leads people to think that this is some kind of a new thing is causing them to draw some pretty mistaken — and unintentionally hilarious — conclusions that make them look like utter fossils. For example: not even knowing who their target web audience is in the first place.
Take for instance the latest article by the estimable and usually very astute and insightful Alan Mutter, first published on E&P and republished on his blog: Digital Natives: More different than you think. It’s about a recent study undertaken in France that detonates the stunning bombshell that “young people have utterly different attitudes than their elders with respect to such seminal concepts as, say, institutional authority. ”
Damn whippersnappers!
According to the study — which, by the way, took three months to interview a statistically insignificant sample of 100 kids (you know those French) — your average 18- to 24-year-old digital natives:
- “don’t trust politicians, social institutions, the media or corporations”
- “can’t get enough information fast enough”
- “view life as a game of outsmarting authority to beat a system they disdain”
- “enjoys using all tools available in his arsenal to outsmart the merchant system”
In the history of humankind, has there ever been a group of 18- to 24-year-olds who didn’t? I mean aside from the preppies, the squares, the jocks, and the Young Republicans.
According to Mutter, the implications for newspapers are:
- “This pretty much rejects everything newspapers stand for.”
- “Newspapers are the antithesis of the empty info-calories often preferred by Digital Natives.”
- “The most satisfying way a Digital Native can interact with a newspaper is to argue with it.”
- “This . . . suggests the obsolescence of advertising as we know it.”
Oh, for the love of God. It’s like listening to Barry Goldwater rant against them damn hippies.
In other words, what the study has really revealed to newsmen is not that the Web has fostered a new kind of readership that demands a new kind of journalism. What the study has revealed is that journalists are older than the people who don’t now, and who never did, read newspapers. If there’s an issue at all here, it isn’t a technological one. It’s generational.
But see, this is all actually good news for journalism. It means that there’s really nothing new to see here. There has never been a time when kids didn’t believe that adults just don’t get it, or when adults didn’t believe that kids speak a different language. There has never been a time when dramatic changes in technology didn’t completely disrupt how people talk to each other and upend social mores and confuse the shit out of everyone. And there has never, ever been a time when the 18-24 demographic ever gave a flying rat’s ass about newspapers. The digital revolution is just like any other revolution. It’s brand new, and it’s not new at all.
The bad news for journalism is that this study hammers one more nail into the coffin where the “ZOMG The Web Killed Newspapers” myth lives during daylight hours. It means that newspaper owners can’t keep blaming Craigslist and Facebook for the demise of the Fourth Estate anymore. The back-office dimwits who merged newspapers into corporate behemoths that existed only to fuel quarterly dividends, who demanded the newsrooms become profit centers only to give away their content for free, who insisted on hitching the revenue wagon to a single volatile and fickle source, are the real culprits. The impact of the digital revolution was nothing that a sound business model couldn’t have weathered and even turned to its advantage. Bloggers didn’t kill the newspaper. It was the newspapers’ to lose. And the people who blame The Kids Today are the ones who lost it.
Failed business models aside, journalism has always been, and will always be, about crusty old editors sending out hardboiled reporters to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. The InterWebs and the cellular phones and the MyFace and I-don’t-know-what-all haven’t changed that.
So peace out, dudes.
Categorised as: The Kids Today
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I am a devotee of all things Howard Weaver. Check out his editorial manifesto for the Alaska Advocate, vintage 1977: http://bit.ly/bwhFd4 . Even then, it seems, newspapers were dying. Apparently, newspapers have *always* been dying. Sheesh. I bet if you dig up copies of Benjamin Franklin’s paper you can probably find editorials about how social media — the town crier, in his case — was just killing his business model.
What we need is something like a Buddhism for manmade artifacts. What people call “dying,” others call “changing.” What’s dead is only yesterday’s concept of the newspaper. Today, yesterday’s newspaper is dying by giving birth to tomorrow’s newspaper. Now, every day, reread that sentence and it will be as applicable as it was the day before.
OK, now I have to seriously wonder if perhaps Alan Mutter really doesn’t understand how business works after all.
In his latest post, “Ice cream shop out-‘fans’ S.F. Chronicle,” he laments, “The shop, which produces such exotic flavors as prosciutto ice cream and beet sorbet, has 301,352 followers on Twitter vs. the 223,539 individuals who buy the print edition of the San Francisco Chronicle on an average weekday or the 10,639 people who follow the paper’s website on Twitter.”
(*Pause*)
Let me see if I understand Mr. Mutter’s concern here. On an average day, 223,539 people pay money to read the newspaper, while across town 301,352 people pay nothing to read about ice cream.
(*Pause*)
Yep, I read that right.
On an average day, do 301,352 people walk through the ice cream parlor and buy ice cream? Probably not. Unless they have a really big freezer, I’m guessing the shop would probably run out of the prosciutto and beet cones at about the 150-200 mark. Which is not a huge percentage of the 301,352 people reading the tweets. And how many of those are coming back every day, five days a week?
Having posited this shaky thesis, Mr. Mutter then invites readers to “Think about it: A barely two-year-old business with no marketing budget in a modest storefront in a less-than-fashionable part of town now has a larger and arguably more passionate audience than a once-mighty metro daily that traces its history back to 1865.”
“Arguably more passionate?” You just told me that 223,539 Chronicle readers demonstrate their passion for the paper every day by actually paying for the damn thing. Presumably, to read most of it. How much passion does it take to read 140 characters that you got for free? Assuming, of course, that they even read it at all in that instant before it was washed off the bottom of the screen by a descending wave of even more recent tweets?
Not to mention what will happen to the parlor when the novelty of root-vegetable-flavored ice cream wears off. Been around for two years already, you say?
Alan, you can go chasing after the people who like to read about ice cream if you want to, but if I’m the manager of a newspaper I’ll be over here courting the people who want to give me money for my product.
If this is really how business works in Mr. Mutter’s head, then I can safely file him away with the likes of Jeff Jarvis and Clay Shirky and forget all about him. There are plenty of serious people out there contributing something of value to this discussion for me to read instead. Feh.
I’m not going to keep on posting egregious examples of the cluelessness of Media Two Point D’Oh (though I probably have a shot at a profitable daily blog out of it if I ever get bored with my day job), but this morning I was ambushed by another classic non-sequitur during my morning coffee reading.
On the one hand, we have the Washington Post saying that it’s pretty thrilled with the results of plunking down money to buy a Twitter trending topic for the midterm elections and getting 9% “engagement” out of it, defined as people who “clicked on a link, retweeted something, or followed the Post’s Twitter feed.” For paying out thousands of dollars to generate a one-day spike in freebie-grabbing drive-bys, the Post is hailed by The Atlantic, among others, for its “willing[ness] to take social media seriously as the means by which news is transmitted now.”
Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation releases their first numbers on online subscribership and app purchases for its two pay-walled newspapers, and says that it has retained over 10% of the readership from the freebie days. For signing up over 100,000 (maybe as many as 200,000) regularly-paying, long-term customers in just four months, the hive mind is chanting obediently that, at last, here is the conclusive proof that paywalls are failures.
Seriously, how is it that some of these people are allowed to obtain drivers’ licenses?
From PandoDaily comes this eye-popping statistic:
That’s right. Four hundred and fifty thousand digital subscribers. That’s four hundred and fifty thousand people who actually give them money.
At $15 to $35 a month for each of those people, that’s $6,750,000 to $15,750,000 a month.
Read that aloud. Between six million, seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars and fifteen million, seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
A month.
Time to send the Shirky & Jarvis Show on its way. Guys, please get off the stage before you’re laughed off. Your fifteen minutes are up.