Study of the Obvious

Timely to the reinvention of my blog is this article on the Editor & Publisher Web site, regarding a study by the Carnegie Corp. on why youngsters like me aren't reading newspapers.

My favorite parts are:

In his report, Brown argues that traditional news outlets must figure out ways to "engage" young people the way the Internet does. "In short, the future of the U.S. news industry is seriously threatened by the seemingly irrevocable move by young people away from traditional sources of news," he writes.

As an industry, newspapers in particular are doing a poor job of responding to these new market pressures, said Brown, a former Washington Post reporter: "Here's this huge revenue opportunity that has moved to Yahoo. Yahoo is having these amazing [financial] quarters. And the newspaper industry response to that is to trim the staff of their online news sites because they want to keep their bottom line. This is classic business school fodder here. When somebody else is eating your lunch, your response is to run away? The industry needs to invest."

"There's not enough risk-taking in the newspaper industry."

It took a study to figure this stuff out? I have taken a poll of one (myself) and come up with the same conclusions they did.

Newspapers should listen to the young people on their staff or better yet promote some younger people to various editor levels; some people who perhaps haven't spent years and years listening to: "This is the way it's always been done and I don't see a reason to change that now."

Also, this guy is stealing my ideas.