Whether they’re actually generation X or Y, both demographics must be suffering horribly at the moment.
Forgive the older person generalising but neither group is known to give a toss about ‘the news’ or newspapers — sport and celebrity gossip excepted. Oh yeah…and fashion. And maybe the more serious in-depth commentary such as TV listings and reviews – so they can catch up online, of course, while playing games, listening to music and instant messaging their mates.
So take a moment to consider their plight: today’s young things’ media consumption and leisure time is spent mostly online. That’s also being reflected in paid-for newspapers in most of western Europe, the US and other parts of the world in steadily declining newspaper circulation figures.* Yet you know what’s going on online…stuff about newspapers making the news. Mainly.
“It’s all so depressing,” you can almost hear them say, “newspapers are so dull. And it’s not going to change anything. And we don’t believe a word that’s printed. And we don’t trust them.” Well…maybe they’re not wrong there.
Tech-Savvy Ys have grown up with technology. They rely on it, naturally. BlackBerrys, iAnythings, laptops, mobies and other gadgets. Ys are connected 24/7. ‘News’ and communication is about sharing and Facebook, YouTube and maybe Twitter. Yep, Twitter news for sure. While e-mail is derided, text messaging rather than face-to-face contact is the way to hit me up.
Generation Xs may not be quite so digitally native and fully attention deficit disorderly. But certainly media-savvy and ‘having a life rather a house’ rant aimed at their baby-boomer parents who saw a mortgages and one foot on the housing ladder as their first priority is the Xs’ signature taunt.
So how tiresome for them all it now must be to now find their every peer-group-approval site and free-from-parental-control media choices are now full of peer-group-disapproval and parental-type guff. What’s a young person to do?
Chocolatey things normally work well on these occasions. As do biscuits. But both categories of rewards have been the subject of bad news stories (sorry Ys and Xs about the n-word) last month.
It seems that while the western world’s inhabitants are getting ever-larger, our favourite snacky things are getting ever smaller. Even Toblerone has become a one-triangle-less victim. But while size matters, price doesn’t: the price of our favourite treats have remained the same even though the ‘portion’ is has declined.
Worse, it may be only a matter of some few grams but, hey, it means we can no longer save that last Malteser for someone really special because it’s no longer there. Our little package of precious sweet promise has been plundered. Sadly, apart from the likely future benefit this may bring to our dental health, there’s very little we can do about this.
A-a-a-a-nyway, this is getting rather newsy and ‘issues-based’ again when the main intention here was to talk about the death of news. At least for the Ys and Xs of the world. Out of the NoTW’s putative 2.6m paid-for circulation, there must have been — soci0-demographics factoring accepted — a reasonably significant number of younger people who will, from this Sunday, have one newspaper less not to have to worry about. Yay.
So there’s a happy ending for the Xs and Y-ers after all. Back to the electronic stuff, guys.
PS: Elana Zak kindly loaned me her pic (top) and she also says much of this (chocs apart) lots better than I do.
*Global newspaper circulation rates have increased but the numbers are skewed by the enormous growth in China, Brazil and especially India.
BlackBerry harmony
What qualifies one person to be that arbiter I disagree with your stance on not making it a popularity contest.
by Noah MacAdam on May 17, 2012