Young Adults and Newspapers

I found it ironic last week when I read the headline in Monday’s New York Times, “Young Adults are Giving Newspapers Scant Notice,” because there I was, a young adult, reading this newspaper article. Well, sort of. I actually caught the article online, so maybe it was technically true that I was giving the newspaper scant notice.

I guess the real question for me was: “Are young people not reading the news at all?” That is a more frightening proposition, of course, if young people today are simply not getting informed on the issues of the day (Paris Hilton news notwithstanding). Like many young adults today, I get my news primarily online. The Internet allows me to choose multiple sources, get varying points of view, and consume large quantities of news in short periods of time. So I decided to test the premise that young people weren’t getting their news at all by analyzing some Comscore data. I compared young people’s Internet news consumption habits with other age groups, and this is what I found:

As you can see, nearly the same percentage of 18-34 year olds (59%) are reading news online each month as 35-54 year olds (61%). Not only that, but they are also going online to get their news nearly as many times each month (12 visits) as 35-54 year olds (13 visits).

So it’s not that young adults aren’t reading the news, they’re just doing it online instead of in newspapers. Maybe they prefer the Internet because it provides a quicker, easier and more comprehensive news experience. Or maybe, like me, they just don’t like to get ink on their fingers.