Youths have no room for news

Sacramento News (registration required): No room for news. Today's tech-savvy youths lack an appetite for traditional media. Excerpt:

Reaching younger news consumers - people just like Krongos - is widely seen as the biggest challenge for media today. Study after study shows that young people (teens and 20-somethings) are ignoring the news in alarming numbers.

But alarming to whom?

Well, the news organizations, of course. But it also should be a societal concern, says David T. Z. Mindich, a former CNN producer and author of "Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don't Follow the News" (Oxford University Press, $20, 192 pages).

Mindich's argument: Our very democracy hinges upon an informed citizenry plugged in to current events. ...

when two dozen local college students were interviewed for this story, many said they felt they were talked down to by mainstream media.

"It's more interesting for me to log on to (Internet) forum boards and see what other people ... are saying about current events than listen to a report on the news for two minutes that isn't very informative at all," says Taylor Wang, a 23-year-old senior at UC Davis.

Avi Ehrlich, a senior journalism major at CSUS, put it more bluntly: "We get exactly what we want when we want it instead of somebody deciding for us what we need." ...

Kevin Krim, manager of the blog Livejournal, which has more than 2 million users, says [this]: "These kids are a hyper-connected, multitasking crowd with five IM windows open at once, the TV going, a video streaming on their laptop and their homework book open. How do you compete with that?"