Young Readers Redefine 'News'

[DeepModem Mom]

Editor&Publisher: Young Readers Redefine 'News' -- But Is it Really News?
By Maegan Carberry

LOS ANGELES (September 03, 2008) -- Entertainment and conversation (in person or via social media) may be entry points to news, but they do not replace fact-driven, straightforward reporting. That was the overwhelming reader response to last week’s column that deconstructed the findings of a recent Pew study that indicated young readers are not actually seeking out news online as frequently as some have argued.

The alternatives, such as The Colbert Report, YouTube videos, Saturday Night Live sketches, or Facebook wall posts, would not be considered news by a person of any age, argued one news designer from Conneticut. “If the point is to show how younger people so totally do consume news, then we can go to whatever lengths necessary to define ‘news’ to suit that thesis,” he wrote to me last week. “Information and ideas are not the same as news. They can derive from news and vice versa. But they are not the same and to define them as such, to me, trivializes the issue.”

The journalism-school side of my brain was inclined to agree with him because certainly one can define as news, say, an A1 story about Iraq from the New York Times or a report on the recession from the Wall Street Journal. But I don’t believe it’s that simple anymore, or that new media enthusiasts are stretching the definition of news to show that the millennial generation is engaged, especially when amateurs are more frequently leading the traditional news cycle, as we saw this past weekend with the blogosphere and Sarah Palin.

Case in point: On Friday I slept until noon because I was exhausted from spending the week at the Democratic National Convention. Beginning around 9am, my Twitter feed started blowing up with text messages about Sarah Palin being selected as John McCain’s running mate. I subscribe to my pal and conservative blogger Liz Hackney’s tweets because I like to get “news” or “updates” or “info” or whatever we consider that message from her to be, and she is the one who broke this important bit of news to me. Does this not count? Or is it just second-hand conversation, as it would be over dinner? And is this really an important distinction? I got the news regardless.

The problem is, obviously, if Twitter is my only news source. I later went back and researched Sarah Palin extensively on my own, using a variety of media outlets, including The New York Times, Fox News online, Huffington Post’s comments sections, John McCain’s web site and Wikipedia. Several of those wouldn’t show up in the Pew study; does this mean I’m not engaged or that I just have more robust choices?...

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/shoptalk_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003845204

[Reverend_Smitty]

1. with the factual distortions and biases found in "traditional" news sources...

who is to say that they are any better at reporting the news themselves? As an avid blog reader, watcher of the Daily Show and Colbert Report as well as being one of those so-called Millennials I would argue that one would have to be *more* in-tune to the news than the average person just to find any value or humor in those other sources.