The Future of News

The audio component of this story can be found here.

The findings and analysis of this survey can be found here.

This is an interesting poll that was conducted by Reisha Abolofia, Michelle Vu, Ryan Boulanger and Adam Eucker. Our survey’s main objective was to grasp exactly where our age demographic’s feelings are at regarding print and on-line news media.

We pulled surveyors through our Facebook statuses and Twitter updates. It is imperative to have clear assessments of our generation’s news habits. Their interest in news will have an astounding effect on the economic vitality of news organizations and thus their ability to invest in quality journalism.

A few decades ago, adolescent Americans were heavy consumers of news. More than half of the adults under 30 years of age were regular consumers of their daily newspaper. “The notion is that no young person cares about news, and that is wrong,” says Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. “They’re moving to a different distribution system.”

Similar to our survey results, there was a preference for on-line news media as a primary source. However, with the distribution system provided by the Internet, reliable content is sometimes hard to distinguish from the myriad of outlets available.