The Paradox of Popularity: How Young People Experience the News

News is like a whole-wheat sandwich: you eat it because it is healthy, not because it is tasty. (Iris, college student, age 25) There are clear signs that today’s young people pay less attention to conventional media-based news, be it from television or newspapers. Only one out of five 15-year-olds has a broad interest in media information (Beekhoven & Van Well, 1998), while as much as 14 percent of those between age 16 and 24 feel that there is too much news on television (Hargreaves & Thomas, 2002). Although it was always assumed that young people more or less automatically develop a need for news and information once they move into adulthood, this no longer proves to be the case. This particular age effect has been replaced by a so-called “cohort-effect ” (Buckingham, 2000a), which implies that young people’s lack of interest in news is likely to persist when they grow older (Barnhurst & Wartella, 1998; Buckingham, 2000b; Hargreaves & Thomas, 2002; Raeymakers, 2003). The declining appetite for news among young people has to do with fundamental technological changes in our culture. Since the late 1980s, when there were only three television channels in the Netherlands and four in the United Kingdom, Europe has bee