Teenage media habits: to be taken seriously?

Robson's outlook for print newspapers was not very positive, mainly based on his thoughts how long it takes to read a paper. "No teenager that I know of regularly reads a newspaper, as most do not have the time and cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text while they could watch the news summarised on the internet or on TV," he said. Cost is another issue, Robson points out. "Teenagers are very reluctant to pay for a newspaper," he believes, so freesheets are more popular. Tabloid size is popular as it allows the paper to be read easily on public transport.

Online, standard advertising is not popular, according to Robson. "Teenagers see adverts on websites (pop ups, banner ads) as extremely annoying and pointless, as they have never paid any attention to them and they are portrayed it such a negative light that no one follows them."  Viral marketing is more appealing, he said.

Parallels are often drawn between the newspaper and the music industries when considering charging for online content. If what Robson says is true, it would seem that considerable changes in mindsets are needed before it would be possible to charge the very young online (although clearly teenagers are unlikely to be a major target market.) Teenagers are "very reluctant" to pay for music, Robson assets, preferring to download it illegally or stream it. Most of his friends have never bought a CD, he added.

Advice which the makers of e-readers should maybe be taking is that "anything with a touch screen is desirable," and "anything with wires" is not.

For the those newspapers who have been using social networks to make their content mor visible and connect with readers, it might be useful to know that teenagers do not use Twitter, according to Robson, but are avid Facebook fans. Thousands of newspapers use their Twitter feeds to publicise their articles and communicate with readers, and many have created fan pages on Facebook. As Guardian blogger Kevin Anderson pointed out, this was not really breaking news. For example, only 4.4% of visitors were younger then 18, according to comScore data from May, Anderson noted.

Since the report was published, many have expressed scepticism both about the value of the information, a lot of which is arguably common sense, and the fact that these are the views of just one boy. Robson told the Times that he believes his report represents the collective wisdom of about 300 teenagers, but clearly there is no statistical value to his claims.

The Guardian published responses by two teenage girls aged 16 and 17, who both pointed out, correctly, that a 15-year-old male Londoner cannot speak for all British teenagers. While the girls agreed with some of Robson's thoughts, they did not support everything he said. 16-year-old Izzy Alderson Blench insists that teenagers "DO read newspapers" and not just freesheets, but "real ones" too. "Even if it is just the weekend section or the magazine, the majority of teenagers will read an interview or feature in a newspaper regularly. Some even read the news," she clarifies. Eloise Veljovic, 17, agrees that many teenagers do buy tabloids rather than quality newspapers. She does not agree, however, that teenagers do not read newspapers because they don't have the time to, but attributes whether they do or not to their family upbringing.

Aralynn McMane, WAN-IFRA director of young readership development, also thought that the report was anecdotal rather than groundbreaking. "This made an interesting read, but anyone who works regularly with young people probably already knows most of what's in the report, plus the nuances and the differences in their own countries," she said. "What's really interesting," she added, "is to go beyond what someone says they or others do and somehow get at what's really going on. For example, the Media Management Center looked in depth at how teenagers actually use news websites -- what drew them in and what they hated -- with some surprising results.  I think that's the kind of knowledge we really need right now." [Michael P. Smith will present the results of this study at the 8th World Young Reader Conference set for 27-29 September in Prague.]

As mentioned above, teenagers may not be a newspaper's main target audience, but in ten or twenty years most of these young people will have increased spending power and make up a significant part of the market, so taking note of what they do and do not appreciate is undoubtedly valuable.

Source: Morgan Stanley (via FT), Financial Times, Guardian