The study questions what kinds of news young people are attracted to, it asks them why and tries to analyze how they obtain it. The analysis of the findings is the most intriguing. The AP finds that young people are often dissatisfied with the news they obtain because it lacks context, but are experiencing "news fatigue" because they are constantly overwhelmed with snippets that lack back stories or indications of what may happen in the future as a result.
The study concludes there must be multiple entry points to a story that includes follow-up stories, back stories and generally all the information that young readers are looking for, but missing. Information from the study suggests there are a multitude of ways consumers enter into news: through friends, headline links in e-mail, television reporting, radio and many, many others. News providers, the AP says, need to find more appealing ways to lead people into content and then offer up as many ways as possible for those readers to continue to access information about that story.
The AP is increasingly moving toward a "what is happening" approach to news rather than a "what has happened" approach. It is focusing more on in-depth entertainment and sports stories because they appeal to young people. It is aggregating news for access using mobile phones/PDAs, because that's often where young people are getting their information.
The AP is communicating with its audience, exploring new forms of storytelling and trying to capture America through its own perspective.
I bet they think the rest of us should do the same.
Where online consumers once surfed and bookmarked news sites, users now wonder why a logical trail through the news can’t simply unfold, link by link, across a multitude of sources. Significant human cooperation, on a very large scale, would have to occur to ensure that outcome across the worldwide Internet.
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