What teens’ cellphone mania means for the news business
Dante Chinni
Posted: 07.13.2009 / 7:32 AM PDT
A group of journalism students at Syracuse University examining how America’s youths use technology, about whom we wrote about this spring, just finished traveling to the original 11 Patchwork Nation communities and talking to people about how communications technology – everything from laptops to mobile phones – affects their daily life.
Words, pictures, and videos of those experiences are now available on their website, Young and the Wireless. The students’ final work, a part of the Knight Foundation’s News21 Project, won’t be on the site until August, but there are blogs – in words and video – worth a look.
The video “7 kids. 1 laptop. 2 hours of tape,” to name one, shows how one computer is passed from person to person within a family in El Mirage, Ariz., a heavily Hispanic “Immigration Nation” community. Note the age range of the kids involved and the amount of use. The group’s El Mirage blog, examining how the locals there use technology, is also an interesting read.
A group of Syracuse U. students who spent time in Lincoln City, Ore., a small-town “Service Worker Center,” recorded some views on how people of various ages would rebuild the world with technology. Those students polled 43 teens at the local high school about their media preferences.
One question asked “what of these do you use first each day?” and listed a set of options. Not a single student said “newspapers.” On the top of the list was “phone.”
The media earthquake
There are probably a host of reasons for that answer. Lincoln City does not have a daily newspaper, for one. For another, teenagers tend not to be the age group most engaged in the larger world – the stresses of growing up take a lot of brain bandwidth.
But the struggles among America’s newspapers speak of a massive restructuring of the news industry. Circulation continues to plummet. And it’s not as if the numbers for television news are much better.
What’s interesting in the Young and Wireless reports, however, is simply how connected the up-and-coming generation is – and that it’s about a lot more than laptops and desktops.
In fact, most Lincoln City teens don’t have their own desktops and laptops, unlike students in, say, the wealthier “Monied ‘Burb” of Los Alamos, N.M. The beach-side tourist town is not poor, but it does have a number of people who struggle to get by. The surrounding area of Lincoln County has a median household income of about $34,500 a year – about $2,500 less than the national median for counties.
But these teens do have a close technological companion: their phones – regular cellphones, not necessarily smartphones. The first thing they do when they wake up is fire up the phone and start sending messages, checking messages, and otherwise connecting with the larger world.
Right now, that larger world means friends and making plans for getting together later. But as they grow up, that will evolve. News will become a part of those conversations, blurring the line between texting and news disseminating. Look at the Facebook pages of 20-somethings now and you already see this kind of blurring.
And that has big implications about the media landscape of the future.
A decentralized news environment
It means the next generation’s reliance on new technology for understanding the world will grow dramatically regardless of income. As today’s teens get older, people in less wealthy community types will drive the digital news revolution just as much as those in wealthier places. In such a world, it’s difficult to imagine how actual physical newspapers or TV newscasts will have much place.
It also appears that news dissemination will become less linear – will be based more on things like social networks and even the serendipity of when a person checks on headlines (which could be anytime with mobile devices) rather than an editor’s decision about the front page or the TV newscasts’ rundown.
This is already a growing trend, but it is going to accelerate, possibly at lightning speed, as the next generation becomes more steady news consumers – and as others exit.
If the next generation is going to push this revolution forward, how much time remains in the current media environment? That’s something we’ll look at this week as we study broadband penetration in our 12 communities.
