Youngsters not interested in news

A report coming out of Harvard yesterday that most kids have little or no interest in the News does n't surprise me at all.

I have written on these pages before that my experience as a mature student on my journalism course of how little interest some students have in current affairs.

I personally find it difficult to comprehend how some body who wants to persue a career in journalism cannot be interested in the goings on in the world.


This report is based on the American experience but I am pretty sure that a similar survey in the Uk would produce similar if not worse results


"Although some observers claim that 9/11 and the Iraq conflict have sparked unusually high levels of interest in current affairs among the upcoming generation of citizens, the survey does not support the claim, at least in the context of attention to daily news coverage. Teens are significantly less attentive to daily news than young adults, who in turn pay substantially less attention than older adults. The survey found, in fact, that 28 percent of teens pay almost no attention to daily news and that an additional 32 percent are casually attentive to a single source only. Taken together, 60 percent of teens can be considered basically inattentive to daily news, as compared with 48 percent of young adults and only 23 percent of older adults"

The report goes onto say

"In comparison with older adults, younger Americans were relatively more attuned to soft news stories (such as the death of Anna Nicole Smith) than to hard news stories (such as the congressional vote on the troop surge in Iraq). In many cases, teens and young adults learned of soft news stories through another person rather than from news coverage directly."

A fact definitely bourne out by my experience of the stories that are picked for assignments on the course.