Why Teenagers Don't Read Magazines

Adam Tinworth
Adam Tinworth

John Naughton‘s speech to the Society of Editors conference last week has reprinted in The Observer as Young people don’t like us. Who can blame them? It’s a corker:

Now look round the average British newsroom. How many hacks have a Flickr account or a MySpace profile? How many sub-editors have ever uploaded a video to YouTube? How many editors have used BitTorrent? (How many know what BitTorrent is?)

And while some of our teenagers’ interests coincide with ours, many do not. Here, for example, are the top blog tags on Technorati last night: Bush, careers, college, comedy, Congress, death, Democrats, elections, Flickr, gay, Halloween, Iraq, Microsoft, money, Republicans, Saddam, Ted Haggard, vote, war, breaking-news, tagshare, YouTube. Some you’ll recognise. But you won’t see much about many of these in the papers.

It’s not only an accurate view of the way things are in many media businesses, it’s also a roadmap as to where they should be…

JournalismmediaPublishingteenagers

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Adam is a lecturer, trainer and writer. He's been a blogger for over 20 years, and a journalist for more than 30. He lectures on audience strategy and engagement at City, University of London.

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