Time to come clean.
When you ask students why they don’t buy newspapers, watch television news or tune into radio news their excuses will all lead in a similar direction: Time.
Generation Y have all the immediacy of an emergency news bulletin with none of the substance.
When your day to day existence is made up of instant messaging and live feed, it’s no wonder our generation think they are too busy and important to inform themselves of the outside world. They have been taught by adoring, pampering parents and over-paid teachers that their world is the most important.
Generation Y have grown up in an environment that panders to their every need. They can get almost anything they want when they want it, and this is just as true of communication mediums. Theirs is literally a world of choice. Funnily enough, the generation who live in a world which has become a smaller place because of communication, is only interested in their tiny microcosm. If something doesn’t affect a Gen Y they can’t see the importance of knowing about it. Facebook and Twitter are clear testiment to this.
Although there are the odd class full of communication students who feel the need to keep up to date with news and current affairs, this minority are not going to keep an entire diverse industry alive.
It all boils down to one thing. Generation Y is simply too lazy.
The excuse of “I’m simply too busy” is just that. An excuse. If they find time to check their Facebook thirty times a day, they can certainly check the news online. But if it came down to a power battle between the Sydney Morning Herald online and Facebook, the latter would certainly win.
The problem of decline in media consumption has been debated by many journalism students. The format of a newspaper has been called outdated and cumbersome, the television news restrictive, and online platforms accused of being daunting and badly researched. But the problem is less about news media and more about Gen Y’s favourite topic: US.
The battle that news media is losing is not one of content but care factor. And currently gen Y’s is almost zero. Perhaps, then, it shouldn’t be a battle, but a compromise. It would be impossible to convince an adolescent that “real news” is more important than the student microcosm. However, an obvious old adage comes to mind.
If Mohammed won’t come to the mountain…
If students are too lazy to access the media that is so readily at their fingertips, why not seek out the places they are frequenting.
If The Australian online had a Facebook group that posted live news updates on my homepage and during the thirty times a day I checked it something interested me, I would certainly click a link to their site. This way, I get the most essential information, I do even less work and the news media site gets more hits. Everybody wins.
All without me ever knowing I left the microcosm.
And this way we can all stop pretending we’re time poor.
Contributed by Courtney Colborne, Shannon Cuthbert, Emily Boyle, Peter Kesina, Tayissa Barone, Elizabeth Grant
