The Indiepub Blog

Links of Note: July 16, 2007

July 16, 2007 12:44 PM Posted by mac

Here's a shocker: young adults don't consume news. A Harvard report titled "Young People and News" (pdf) found:

"Only 16 percent of the young adults surveyed aged 18 to 30 said that they read a newspaper every day and 9 percent of teenagers said that they did. That compared with 35 percent of adults over 30. Furthermore, despite the popular belief that young people are flocking to the Internet, the survey found that teenagers and young adults were twice as likely to get daily news from television than from the Web."

It's time for newspaper folk (and media people in general) to answer one simple question: Why should 18-30 year olds care about the news?

That's the problem -- media outlets can't reasonably attract young adults because they can't justify their existence to the younger generations. Why should someone ditch Facebook or MySpace to read/watch the latest dispatches from Iraq? Why should they ignore text messaging to read up on health care?

Media outlets are the once-popular kids who never had to work for attention -- people watched/read the news because it was the news. But that's not good enough anymore. Now, outlets need to provide context and connections. They need to go beyond the story to show how this event, in this part of the world, has this effect on YOU.

Via Editors Weblog

Widgets Are All The Rage As Marketing Tool, Though Hype Still Escapes Many Advertisers
(PaidContent.org)

PaidContent breaks down a pair of recent BusinessWeek articles that approach Widget Fever from two perspectives: the breathless enthusiasm of widget developers and the "what the hell is a widget?" confusion of businesses.

One verrry interesting sub-point:

"Google is making $5,000 grants or $100,000 seed money available to widget makers and it has begun testing Gadget Ads, which lets online retailers transform their display ads into a widget by adding videos, animation, and real-time news or marketing data to them.