Robert W. Deckherd, Belo’s chairman and CEO made that point at a presentation to shareholders and analysts at a UBS Media Week meeting. He continued to talk about what a newspaper does best, which he said is cover local news, because of the amount of journalists available.

It is not that newspapers do not provide the news that young people want, its that they want that news somewhere else, like the Internet for example. This is why newspapers need to make their news available on any platform that is desirable to the readers.

At all Gannett daily newspapers, breaking news will appear first on web sites and digital services and less on newspapers. If digital becomes more successful, the print paper will become smaller, and likely will be targeted at an audience of 45 years old and above.

Only 16% of people 18-30 years old read a newspaper daily today, according to a report issued in June by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

But not only 16% are interested in news, it is simply that they get their news primarily from other sources like TV or the Internet. Most newspapers have realized the trend and have Websites, however, an alarming number of those sites don’t have video.

Jupiter Media, a media resource company, says 33% of online young adults use the Internet as their primary news source and that number is increasing.

Newspapers need to allow people to get news when and how they want it. Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s leading morning newspaper, provides a good example. A special Nokia mobile phone has been made available via their website, that has a special button that when pressed takes the user directly to the newspaper’s mobile web site.

Thorbjoern Larsson, the editor-in-chief and publisher of Dagens Nyheter, made the point simply, “This is yet another way of distributing the news.”

Source: Follow The Media