Kids Ignore Local Paper Sites; IM Rules
According to this story in OJR, newspapers are having a very hard time getting younger readers to visit their Web sites. Youth, who
don’t bother with the print edition anyway, bypass the online local brand in favor of a national brand such as Yahoo. It’s like
they wanna shop at The Gap instead of an increasingly marginalized local boutique.
Our Managing Editor of Reports, Laura Higgins, has two teen daughters so I asked her to verify this. They said, “Yup.” But
then they added that grownups vastly overestimate how important email and Web sites are. All that really matters, apparently, is
instant messaging.
They firmly told me that our article this week on how to email teens definitely had the wrong focus. IM is where it’s at.
Maybe local newspapers should get together with the ActivBuddy folks and create a LocalNews Buddy.
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/business/1059602230.php
http://www.activebuddy.com/
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