(Limor Peer)

Take any teen at any given moment and you are likely to see him or her using media of some sort. Teens use media to get music or the latest entertainment or sports news, communicate with friends, play games, do school work, take up a cause, gossip, express their creativity, and pass the time. Just about anything they do involves digital media one way or another; they are "digital natives."

Oh, and maybe, occasionally, they go online to get the news.

The Media Management Center's just-released research shows that teens most often do not go online to get the news - but that they will read / view it if it's there in front of them when they log on and if, as the report's title suggests, it catches their eye.

A series of in-depth interviews with 65 Chicago area teens, ages 14-18, led us to conclude that news organizations' Web sites are not a prime destination for teens, as many do not go to them to check the news (or anything else, for that matter). Just about the only time teens will purposely go to a news Web site (the local daily newspaper, for example) is if they need specific information (for a class assignment, for example; this is a key motivation), if they live in a household where that is the norm (this is not widespread, we found), or if they have a personal inclination to keep up with the news (a minority, we found).

In our research into media experiences, we look at how consumers - young or old - relate to media and the ways in which media fit in their lives. The idea is that understanding how a particular medium is integrated into a person's life can give us important insight into ways to increase that person's usage of the medium. Building on this approach, we set out to find how teenagers relate to news online. It quickly became very clear that whatever experiences teens have with news online, the result is more often than not infrequent and indifferent consumption.

Teens say that when they do get news online, it is routinely from sites they access when they first log on with the intent of doing something else online, such as email. These sites are often Internet portals such as Yahoo or AOL or a local cable company such as Comcast or AT&T, which are a general gateway to the Internet but frequently also aggregate news headlines as well.

Once there, teens may get news from a variety of sources to which they show little loyalty, but great discernment. A story from CNN, for example, carries more weight for them, because it comes from a large and well-reputed news organization that, in their minds, cannot afford the risk of reporting false information. But this will not necessarily cause them to seek CNN stories or go to the site.

If this is the status quo, it does not mean it has to stay this way… The report is full of recommendations that we believe can, in the context of a comprehensive forward-thinking strategy, help news organizations gain with teens. To see more, read the full report here.


By Limor Peer (l-peer@northwestern.edu)
Limor Peer is research director for the Media Management Center and Readership Institute.