That is the question considered in this piece by Erik Sass at MediaPost. Sass refers to a report released last week by the World Association of Newspapers. The text of the WAN announcement can be found here. The headline finding from the WAN funded 10 focus groups in 10 countries researching how young people get their news is:
Young people perceive traditional media as more accurate, trustworthy and reliable than new media, but many get most of their news and information from another source entirely — family and friends.
The full report can be found here.
The relevance of this report for newsagents is that we rely on newspaper sales – anything which affects, today or into the future, newspaper sales is relevant to us and must b factored into our business planning. What mainstream media is experiencing is generational change. The community, particularly the younger community, is moving from an aggregated media platform to no platform as such.