 - Chapter 6 -
Reach Young Readers Through Social MediaINTRODUCTION Although widely accepted that young people are not picking up the habit of reading print newspapers as they grow up, it seems that these “digital natives” are not frequenting online papers either. This is not because young readers are not interested in news; in fact they are very interested. Their infrequent experience with newspapers, be them print or digital, is more due to the hesitation of the “digital immigrants” that run the papers to adopt the Internet practices to which young readers are accustomed.
ARTICLES Is social networking just a fad or here to stay? Relatively new on the Internet scene, social networks have attracted a nearly unprecedented number of users in a very short amount of time. But will their popularity last? Mixed opinions from journalists and investors in 2006 demonstrated that the social media phenomenon is too young to accurately predict its long-term impact. The difficulties of integrating global social networks With all of the Internet hype, it’s obvious that social and mainstream media are becoming increasingly blurred. But youth’s latest obsession, social networking has, for the most part, eluded the minds behind newspapers’ digital makeover. Why has it been so hard for a medium traditionally based around a community of subscribers to transfer that community to the Web? Does news have an ‘owner’ on the Web? A principal characteristic of Web 2.0 and one that young readers will forever expect from their Internet experience is that users of a website feel like they “own” it, like a site’s content is theirs and that they can control it. Clearly, this is a feature that runs contrary to the essence of a newspaper whose content is traditionally produced by a professional staff and owned by a publisher. But in adapting to the participatory Web, newspapers need to modify their conventional perceptions of where readers stand in the news hierarchy. Here are some examples of what happens when users lose their feeling of “ownership…” CONCLUSION Social news websites are considered by many in traditional and new media as causing a monumental shift in the way people consume news. To get a better idea of just how this is occurring, Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson, respectively founder and CEO, digg.com (see explanation Section 1), Fabrice Florin, founder, NewsTrust (see explanation Section 1), and Edward Roussel, digital editor, The Telegraph Media Group (home to the UK’s largest circulated quality daily) joined to debate social news and the impact it will have on traditional media.  |
