only way you’re ever going to get the average 21-year-old to read a
daily newspaper is to wait 9 years until he’s 30.
Sigh. Or, you know, give him a paper right now that is HIS and he feels invested in and wants to read each day.This stat really can’t be repeated often enough:
college students surveyed had read their college newspaper in the past
month. Readership was highest at campuses with daily papers, where 92
percent had read a student newspaper in the previous month. By
comparison, just over one-third of students reported reading their
daily community paper at least weekly.
(Yes, it’s a survey for a college newspaper marketing firm. Does anybody BUT newspaper marketing firms give a damn if people are reading newspapers anymore?)
And you know what? I got this same line of bullshit from so-called adults when I was 21 and had been working a daily paper for three years. “Your generation doesn’t read.” Well, okay, now you’ve made me not want to read your paper since you obviously have a HUGE amount of respect for me, and I read three newspapers every day so fuck you, basically. This kind of crap always comes up in discussions with college journalism kids and I don’t know where you get by busting on the next generation as being shit, I really don’t. It makes me crazy.
I don’t want to rag Carter too much, though, because after arecounting of this thoroughly excellent series the Telegraph has going on, he makes this point:
As this column goes to press, theTelegraph
had already devoted 120 broadsheet pages to the story, in a little more
than two weeks. And although the paper broke the stories on its Web
site, then fed them into the next morning’s print edition, sales of the
actual paper exploded. On the Friday the story broke in print, theTelegraph
sold out. Since then, the paper has sold an extra 600,000 copies.
According to the paper, it was the biggest sales uptick for a
non-conflict-related story since World War II. More letters poured in
from readers than at any other time in theTelegraph’s history.
The story was so compelling that competing papers were grudgingly
forced to illustrate their reports on the affair with shots of theTelegraph’s banner headlines. There is now talk of a knighthood for Lewis for his part in uncovering the scandal.
And they say newspapers are dead.
And had he ended with YOU MUST CHILL I HAVE HIDDEN YOUR KEYS or JESUS TITS or SCHMUCKS I’d be forced to declare I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Hat tip, though technically as a blogger I’m supposed to just steal without crediting, to reader DR.
A.