Paula Poindexter: Will there be an audience for news in the future?

Introducing her new book, UT journalism professor Paula Poindexter raised the question: Given current trends, will there be an audience for news in the future? “The answer to this question,” she said, “is directly related to the future of news media, the future of education, and the future of democracy.”

Perhaps the short answer is, well, maybe. If news organizations continue with business as usual, reporting in a distanced and detached way, not to mention with little attention to issues that interest women and young people, then there’s no hope, Poindexter said. “Unless there is something done on multiple fronts, there may not be an audience for news in the future. This isn’t just a problem for TV, or for newspapers, etc. It’s a problem for all of us.”

To better illustrate the present landscape of news audiences, Poindexter introduced a taxonomy of news user types:

1. news enthusiasts—who are strongly connected to the news because of their passion for it;
2. news monitors—who are connected to news so they can keep track of things of personal interest;
3. news betweeners—who are connected to news one to six days a week;
4. news eclectics—who are more or less connected to the news but have no pattern for news use nor have an allegiance to a specific medium or type of news;
5. news accidentals—who have a weak connection to news and whose news consumption is non-purposeful (e.g., stumbling upon news while reading mail in Gmail or Yahoo);
6. news intenders—who plan to read or watch the news but always find something gets in the way;
7. news avoiders—who deliberately shun the news and prefer to stay disconnected. (see Table 1.2 on p. 9)

Poindexter further introduced a model of the factors and forces influencing how people approach news; it can help us think about what we (that is, journalists) can affect in changing consumers’ relationship to news, she said. The illustration in her book is much easier to understand, but I’ll try to walk through it here:

1. Individual differences—demographics such as age, income, social status, and education—are preeminent, the first and most important factor in guiding news-use decisions and habits;
2. These differences feed into socialization, which is a process that takes place throughout life as our peers, assumptions (say, about what is newsworthy, or whether it’s important to follow the news), family background, and other socio-cultural factors combine to shape our outlook toward journalism;
3. These factors, combined with attitudes, normative beliefs, and motivation, lead consumers to arrive at a “decision” (conscious or not) of the type of news user they are going to be—an avoider, an intender, an accidental, etc.

Drilling down on this picture of the news consumption process, Poindexter turned to another breakdown—of “attitudes and dimensions of the news-centered object” (p. 30). Here, we recognize that all-important attitudes toward news are shaped by dimensions (or characteristics) of news—such as the medium, institution, cost, time, access, complexity, multitasking capability, and “feel.” (Those latter two are especially important for the next generation of news consumers, for whom newspapers don’t “feel” right—being so bulky and hard to recycle—and for whom communication is a multi-way blur of Facebooking, text messaging, Twittering, and more all at once.)

In the what-can-we-do-about-it category, Poindexter said the focus should be on socialization.

“The present young adult generation, in college now, is lost, but we can help the upcoming generation. One way to do that is [Newspapers in Education]. NIE studies have shown that young people exposed to newspapers in schools have become newspaper readers. Same goes for young people exposed to newspapers at home. So there are two key areas of socialization: home and school.” (But for NIE to be done right, she said, it can’t be presented as a “textook,” which then makes it feel like “work.”)

To our audience of mostly Ph.D. students, she concluded: “What does it mean that there may not be an audience for news? There will be no advertisers spending money to reach no audience that’s not there, which means there will be no newsrooms, which means there will be no money to pay journalist salaries or invest in journalism, which means there will be no reporters and producers to create the news. If there are no reporters, there will be no need for journalism schools, which also means there will be no journalism professors.”