The news that Simon Jenkins is joining The Guardian is tied to even worse news: he is replacing David Aaronovitch who is filling Jenkins’s slot at The Times. I don’t always agree with Aaronovitch, but I always find him worth reading and thought provoking. A huge step down for The Guardian.
The Carnegie Corporation’s report, Abandoning the News, is an eye-opener on how young people in the US have deserted conventional news media (hat tip to Dan Gillmor). Newspapers fare particularly badly.
“From 1972 to 1998, the percentage of people age 30-to-39 who read a paper every day dropped from 73 to 30 percent. And in just the years between 1997 and 2000, the percentage of 18-to-24-year-olds who say they read yesterday’s newspaper dropped by 14 percent, according to the Newspaper Association of America.”
I suspect the wholesale neglect of newspapers by the young isn’t as severe in the UK, but the trend is the same. The entire Carnegie report is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the developing media ecology.