Perhaps you’ve seen the YouTube video of the baby navigating an iPad like a pro. Moments later, the same baby is given a magazine, and is clearly perplexed when the pages do not respond to her swipes and grabs.
Such is the life for the Digital Natives, the newest generation of current infants to 18-year-olds who will experience a life that has always included digital media. By the time the baby in the video turns 18, it’s with pretty good certainty that the newspaper will be a very different product in the journalism industry – one that could possibly not include a printed edition, at least not in its current form.
I’ve been a newspaper journalist for more than 20 years. When I was growing up in central Georgia, we had two newspaper subscriptions – one to the daily Augusta Chronicle and the other to the weekly Louisville News & Farmer. Unlike my daughter, a digital native, the printed newspaper has been a part of my daily experience pretty much my entire life. But that’s not how my kid gets her news – despite the fact that at least one newspaper lands in our front yard every morning.
She and her teenage friends get their news from social media sharing – not from the newspaper or even TV. Whether it’s a lockdown at a metro area school or Beyonce’s sister’s elevator fight with Jay Z, she’s very much informed about the news – at least news she deems relevant to her and her peers.
Just last week, we hosted a group of students from Kennesaw State University. The students – mostly juniors and seniors — spent a half day in our newsroom observing and listening nd asking questions of reporters and editors. Of course, we always take the opportunity to learn as much as we teach.
This group of early 20-year-olds, considered young Millennials (or digital immigrants), admitted that they rarely read the printed paper. Instead, like my 15-year-old, they get their news primarily from Facebook posts, Twitter feeds, Instagram and blogs. On occasion, they will read their campus paper. Why? Because it’s free, it’s everywhere, it contains relevant campus news, and it usually has fast-food coupons.
One student said the only time she thinks to buy a newspaper is when there’s “historic” news. Then, she’ll buy two papers – one to read and one to save.
For an editor who’s a leader for the print edition, that can be a hard pill to swallow. Luckily, they didn’t tell me anything I hadn’t already heard. More than anything, it validated where we’re headed as a company and as an industry.
Like most newspapers across the country, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is focusing on becoming an audience-first (or digital first) newsroom. Instead of merely trying to get people to come to us, we’re now going after the audience. We recently reorganized our newsroom in topic teams that will allow reporters (who are closest to readers) and their editors to have more say about what they cover and how they cover it. We try to get our stories online faster and use research and metrics to inform us more about what readers want.
Now that doesn’t mean that we don’t use our own expertise and news judgment to make decisions on stories with impact and importance. It wouldn’t be fair to readers if we only based our decisions on web traffic and personal preferences. But we are trying to be better listeners to best serve readers.
So what about our older, loyal print readers – The Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers? Those readers are very important to us. We would not be able to sustain what we do without them. It’s safe to say that paying attention to research and metrics has helped us in recent years to better serve them as well. That’s what spurred our efforts to focus on watchdog and investigative journalism and to increase our focus on eliminating bias and perceptions of bias. It’s made us a better, stronger paper as a result.
Like most businesses, it’s important that we grow as our world continues to evolve. The digital world will undoubtedly have great impact on what we do. Who better to learn from than Millennials and Digital Natives?
For years, I’ve been fighting (or at least working to limit) my daughter’s access to social media. I’ve spent so much time in the past monitoring what sites she’s on and trying to tamp down on how many times a day she tweets and whether it’s a good tweet. Yes, I’m one of those moms who dictated early on that she could only tweet five times a day and that it had to be meaningful. Though it makes me laugh now, that edict was serious business then. Not that it lasted all that long — teenagers have a way around almost everything, even more so if it involves a computer, a phone or an iPad.
Now I try to learn from her as much as I can in hopes that it will make me a better parent and a more informed leader in the newsroom. At the recent One Day University, sponsored by the AJC, I attended the session “Children and the Internet.” I was one of two adults who knew what Ask.FM (the question and answer social networking website) was when asked by the course instructor from Columbia University. The other person was a high school teacher.
It’s my hope that in the coming year, that our newsroom will not only learn more about Millennials and Digital Natives, but that we’ll start to figure out a good way to include them more in our newspaper products – give them something they’ll want to read and share with their peers. Truthfully though, it’s my hope that we will go far beyond that and bring more of them into our workplace to lead, to innovate and to inform.
