ABSTRACT
Despite this story’s claim of a sudden change, young people’s turn away from news journalism dates back at least 20 years. In an earlier report, symptomatically entitled The Age of Indifference: A Study of Young Americans and How They View the News (1990), the Times Mirror Center provided some broader historical comparisons. Irrespective of the advent of the so-called ‘Information Age’, the increased provision of news media and the rise in college attendance in the US, the report argues, young people are now less interested in news (particularly ‘political’ news) and less wellinformed than their counterparts in earlier decades. Thus, the percentage of people under 30 who said they ‘read a newspaper yesterday’ declined from 67 per cent in 1965 to 29 per cent in 1996, while measures of information levels and news attentiveness among the young show a decline both over time and relative to older age groups. News about key events in recent political history, such as the revolutions in Eastern Europe, has, the report argues, failed to engage the younger audience.
