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Future-proofing journalism: Youthful tastes and the challenge for the academy

In current discourses about news and young people, there are two main trends. One is the focus on the youth audience’s apparent disinterest in the news, which is supposed evidence of their shallowness and lack of felt civic responsibility (see Buckingham 1999, 171). This is characterized as the seed of a societal malaise which gradually undermines the media’s important place in informing democracy. Despite the traditional news media’s many attempts to appeal to this demographic, academics still talk about them as ‘a generation that rejects news’ (Sternberg 2002, 308). The second, and more common, current of ‘pervasive pessimism’ (McNair 2000, 197) suggests that the media are the problem in the first place; that a casual drive downmarket in commercial news has distracted young people from ‘serious’ news. Both arguments paint a picture that younger generations consistently avoid engaging with the news at all costs, and are instead distracted by mindless entertainment, ‘reality’ television and celebrity gossip – the very things which allegedly have no value in the political economy. The typical extension of this logic is that young people, (unfairly) depicted as ‘the ultimate face of political apathy’ (McKee 2005, 184), represent a looming danger to the future of enlightened, informed public discourse. This picture of impending cultural demise is, however, one image that this paper seeks to repaint. Because the mainstream news agenda has largely alienated this audience group (Sternberg 2002; Evans and Sternberg 2000; Katz 1992, 1993), they are simply going elsewhere for their news, to sources which many will simply not accept as worthy or valid. It is not that young people are switching off the news (or do not care about staying informed, for that matter), but are instead switching over to forms of news that are more interesting and relevant to them. To illustrate this argument I will offer textual and qualitative evidence of this phenomenon, paying particular attention to research conducted into the Australian TV programme The Panel. While not wishing to overstate the originality of the assertions about young citizens and news media (as they have been made elsewhere by Buckingham 2000; Katz 1992; Sternberg 1998, 2004, among others), in this paper I argue that this trend (here further supported by qualitative evidence) does have important implications for the future of journalism as a profession, and therefore for journalism education in the academy.