Teens & News: It's A Disaggregated World
Posted by anastasia on 11-03-2006We all know teens consume their news online vs. in print (Pew: More than 75% of teens get their news from the Web), and that they tend to find it through browsing large portal sites like Yahoo! or just plugging in whatever they're looking for into Google search. We also know how popular Wikipedia is with teens. Another site teens are drawn to is Answers.com, which aggregates lots of different information, multimedia and ads based on whatever term you search for. Answers will soon be teaming up with a company called Inform, which will plug in even more news and information into its "answers." See this blog entry about the deal.
What I think is interesting about this trend in general is that it really speaks to the growing disaggregation of news. Basically instead of having one main source like the New York Times or a local newspaper site, teens prefer to find information from multiple sources in one convenient place. Early adopters/techies do this through RSS feed aggregators. The blog entry goes on to speculate on whether social networking sites that begin integrating news and information feeds will become another new source of news for this generation (don't come to us, we'll come to you). Whenever I talk to newspaper folks, I try to push them on this notion of syndicating as much content as possible online and working on optimizing it so it will show up in Google News and other places where young people may be going first. It's really a news as search or surf results vs. relying on one trusted source. The more the merrier.
Categorized under: Newspapers, Web
November 9th, 2006 at 8:17 am
I was moved to comment on your entry. I am a 7th grade teacher at a small private school in Baltimore. Over the past year I have witnessed this the "disaggregation of news trend" in my classroom. Student's definitions of "sources" are changing as technology changes.
In fact, one of my students recently showed me a new service called AskMeNow that he has subscribed to on his cell phone. From what he explained all you do is text a question to ASKME and in minutes you receive an answer via text message. He told me that he refers to AskMeNow for facts about news and world events and even admitted that he has used it to cheat on tests! As far as he's concerned it’s a perfectly legitimate source of information.
I guess the adult world is going to have to expand the definition of a "source” if we are to understand the next generation. As an aside I confess I have since subscribed to AskMeNow – and it's pretty cool.
November 12th, 2006 at 3:22 pm
Hi Ms. Knox. Thanks so much for commenting – your experience rings very true with the other stories I heard from teachers I interviewed for my book. I hadn't heard of AskMeNow. I'm going to link to it in Ypulse Essentials and add it to a list of sites I'm compiling about how teens are doing their homework on my other blog – Totally Wired. It's a little scary your student admitted to cheating, isn't it?