Young Adults’ Subjective Experience of Newspapers
Kevin G. Barnhurst and Ellen Wartella
Published in Critical Studies in Mass Communication 8 (Summer 1991): 195–209.
Abstract
American newspaper executives and conservative critics complain that young adults who don’t read newspapers and lack a knowledge of basic facts may be unprepared to become informed citizens. Studies also correlate newspaper reading with political interest. Young readers, who begin with comics and turn to newspapers for entertainment, do not find political news meaningful. This study explored what the newspaper means to young adults. Some 164 students wrote autobiographies of their newspaper experiences. Using qualitative and demographic methods, this analysis constructs a composite narrative of how young adults are introduced to newspapers as children, interact with them in the school years, and eventually become regular users. Although they acknowledge the received definition of newspapers as factual sources for citizens, young adults experience the newspaper as a ritual, a symbol, and a tool. They consider the facts in newspapers boring because they deal with contexts unrelated to their lives.
Outline
Newspaper readership has been declining in the United States since the 1960s. In 1970 daily newspaper circulation fell below the number of households for the first time this century, and according to Bogart (1989) the gap is widening. A Simmons Market Research Bureau survey (Bogart, 1989) found that from 1967 to 1987 the number of Americans over eighteen who reported having read a newspaper "yesterday" declined from 76 to 65 percent, with the largest decline (20 percent) among adults eighteen to twenty-four years old. In the past decade young adults have not moved into the newspaper habit as did earlier generations of Americans.
Recent conservative commentary has expressed concerns about young adults’ lack of interest in and ignorance of political and civic issues (Bloom, 1987) . Ravitch and Finn (1987) cite a survey in which fewer than a third of 7800 high school juniors could name the half-century when the Civil War was fought and even fewer who could identify Magna Carta. According to Hirsch (1987), a citizenry ignorant of public and civic affairs cannot continue to learn and will not become productive. And former U.S. education secretary William Bennett lamented, "Democracy cannot endure if ignorance prevails" (quoted in Sanoff, 1987, p. 8).
Americans have also become less supportive of the press. In a Gallup survey for the Times Mirror Company (reported in Robinson and Ornstein, 1990), more Americans questioned the independence, accuracy, and fairness of news organizations in 1990 (62 percent) than in 1985 (53 percent). Bogart (1989) concludes that "among youngsters, reading the paper goes with understanding and support of freedom of the press. As we look at their opinions, their knowledge of public affairs, and their media habits, it is apparent that the future of democratic institutions is linked to the continuing vitality of newspaper reading" (pp. 345–46).
The accumulated evidence from scholarly audience research does tie newspaper reading to political involvement. The studies indicate that frequent newspaper readers, especially those under thirty, are more likely to vote. Bogart (1989) argues that political interest, education level, and newspaper reading are interrelated; as fewer young adults have become newspaper readers, fewer be expected to vote. According to Census Bureau figures, only 36 percent of those younger than twenty-five reported registering and voting in the 1988 elections, compared to 57 percent of all eligible voters.
Although they reach similar findings, audience researchers do not necessarily support conservative critics such as Bloom and Hirsch. Whitney and Wartella (1989) question how knowledge gets measured; while most conservative commentators measure knowledge by the ability to recall names, dates, and places, it may be defined more broadly as education accumulated over time. As a higher percentage of Americans completing college is higher today than ever before, perhaps knowledge has reached an all-time high; in any case, being unable to cite "facts" about civic affairs and historic events doesn’t necessarily mean being unknowledgeable.
Nor do "facts" attract young people to newspapers. In the past decade a number of surveys have questioned the role ov newspapers among youth (summarized in Bogart, 1989). Most American children attend first to the comics and typically do not become regular newspaper readers until the late high-school years; even then, they are more interested in horoscopes, advice columns, fashion features, media news, and the like than in public affairs. These preferences continue through the young adult years and do not necessarily disappear in adulthood. Anecdotal evidence suggests that comics and entertainment features help sustain the audience for newspapers, (Jones, 1991). McAdams (cited in Stepp, 1991, p. 22) found the only good predictor of news article readership was the reader’s prior interest in the topic.
To attract younger readers, in the 1980s newspapers began to redesign their pages, reacting against what Barnhurst (1991) calls "the long journalism" that featured extended articles on problems or "issues." Readers’ objections to the seeming focus on only bad news "spurred on the effort to make the news at least look better" (p. 110). But these cosmetic changes ignored how newspapers relate to citizenship.
The question goes to the the heart of journalism: Whom do reporters serve, how do newspapers get used, and what makes the press significant in public life. The answers cannot be found by measuring trends in newspaper circulation or fact retention. Newspapers are social objects, not mere compendia. They play a role in daily rituals (Carey, 1988). They also serve as significant icons (Panofsky, 1955). And their utility goes beyond the factual (Berelson, 1954). At issue is the newspapers’ cultural meaning for young Americans. Do they view the newspaper as a repository of facts, necessary to responsible citizenship? If so, why don’t they read it?
This study uses the life history methodology, in which respondents write narratives about their media experiences,1 [1The life history technique has been used in several early studies of media and youth, most notably in Blumer’s Movies and Conduct (1933).] to explore the significance of the newspaper for young adults. During the 1989 – 1990 academic year, 164 undergraduates at a large, midwestern university volunteered to create personal biographies of their newspaper experiences. Most of these students were communication majors in their early twenties; over two-thirds were female, and more than 80 percent were white. Most were in middle- and upper-middle-class, so their parents likely had had at least some college education.
Clearly, our volunteers do not constitute a representative sample, and the information they provided is considered here only as initial exploration. Hhowever, while the volunteers may show an educated, middle-class biase, they are importantly representative of two specific groups: first, those whome social critics such as Bloom and Bennett accuse of public affairs ignorance; and, second, those whom newspaper executives seek to obtain and retain as readers (Bogart, 1989).
Our volunteers were specifically directed to construct an autobiographical essay-account of their newspaper experiences, beginning with their earliest recollections. They were further requested to write naturally, frankly, and without exaggeration. Specific efforts were made to preserve the volunteers’ anonymity.
Our study incorporates both qualitative and quantitative methods. The focus of this report is the qualitative analysis of the autobiographies. However, first we provide a brief overview of the students’ media use, based on questionnaires that asked about such use as well as demographic and family background information.
As might be expected, the students report considerable use of mass media outlets (mean number of days per week reading a newspaper = 5.03; watching TV news = 3.27). Sixty percent read only the weekday student newspaper, which contains national and international news items. Another 30 percent of the students say they take a newspaper from their home city, Chicago.
The students are oriented more toward audio-video than to print media. On average, they report spending slightly more than one hour with TV "yesterday" (mean = 66 minutes), slightly less than one hour with radio (mean = 58 minutes), and more than an hour with records and tapes (mean = 70 minutes). By comparison, they reported spending on average 22 minutes "yesterday" with the newspaper. They also report reading an average of only one book for pleasure and three magazines in the previous month. On the other hand, they report on average attending 2.8 movies, watching 2.9 movies on video, and renting 2.13 movies in the previous month. They also report purchasing on average 2.95 records or tapes and attended 1.21 concerts in the previous month.
Following Blumer (1933), we used an inductive technique for analyzing the newspaper biographies. Each author read every essay and independently constructed a list of recurring themes. From these lists, we constructed an annotated inventory that was then used by us and by a graduate student to code each essay for the presence or absence of the themes. We assess only those events on which there was complete consensus.
The students were oriented toward the mass media by virtue of not only their interest in communication study but also their media use. Although they were attentive to news media, they showed a much higher proclivity to attend to audio-visual media and predominantly entertainment programming. The analyses that follow.
Our analysis attempts to construct a composite narrative from the autobiographies without sacrificing specific details or significant variations. We identify students by sex, race, and newspaper reading level: habitual (report reading a newspaper six or seven days a week), frequent (five days a week), or occasional (four or fewer days a week). The autobiographers uniformly divided their newspaper experience into three age epochs: how they were introduced to the newspaper as children; how they used newspapers during their public school years; and how they did or did not make the transition to become regular newspaper users in late adolescence or the college years. We also describe how they discussed their present use of the newspaper and their impression of its influence on them today.
A number of the students began by pointing out how little attention they had ever paid attention to newspapers. Some inferred from this observation that newspapers were unimportant or at least invisible to them. A few said that writing the autobiography forced them to consider newspapers for the first time. A minority female frequent reader wrote —
Having grown up in their presence, it’s very difficult for me to put my finger on a certain, distinct time period when I actually started reading them.
As this example illustrates, the students could remember neither their first glimpse nor their first use of a newspaper. The few students who remembered a specific first encounter were the exception:
My first distinct remembrance of the newspaper’s impact was when Elvis Presley died in 1977, when I was just seven years old. My mother, who loved The King was irate when she read in the newspaper that Elvis died of a drug overdose. She wanted to send a letter to Bob Greene, the journalist who wrote the article, and tell him he was lying. At that moment, I sensed her mistrust of the print media. I didn’t understand that my mother didn’t want to believe what she read in the newspaper, even though it was true. —a white female habitual reader
Having stated that the newspaper played almost no real role in their lives, many nonetheless went on to desscribe the myriad uses to which they or others had put newspapers. Many of these uses were seen as routine or regular — every morning, every time I did a thing, every Sunday, we always did, or I used to do, such-and-such with the newspaper. Seventy (43 percent) of the essays explicitly identified the newspaper as a constant part of the household background. In a few cases the routine itself was memorable or unusual. A minority female occasional reader wrote —
early in the morning my grandmother read the Chicago Sun-Times out loud to my grandfather in the kitchen everyday and always made comments about how dangerous and violent the world was as she read it in the newspaper. Although my grandfather is illiterate, he was still interested about what was going on in the world.
The newspaper played a role in a variety of activities — art work, family time, housework, do-it-yourself projects, and entertainment pastimes. Most of the uses mentioned for newspapers were predictable: hitting the dog with it, putting it in shoes that had holes, and the like. Few were at all unusual, but some students, like a white female frequent reader, implied that using the newspaper for anything other than reading news was odd:
My parents have always found bizarre uses for the newspaper as well. My mother, a sincere plant lover, likes to spread newspaper over our countertops to shield them from soil when she repots her plants.
Students reported making early use of newspapers as an implement (in 70 essays), an art medium (in 56 essays), and a protective covering (in 47 essays). These uses introduced a first frustration with newspapers: the ink rubs off. Each use also offers a fundamental contradiction of the form. Newsprint stains the hands but is used to protect against stains. Newspapers provide useful information, but are also mute implements, used without irony for cleaning and for punishment. Newspapers are designed to be utilitarian, but newsprint is useful as a cheap medium in art, which is not utilitarian. (To a child artist armed with clay putty, the ink rubbing off can be desirable as well as frustrating.) Some autobiographies illustrated the paradox by juxtaposition.
Although the autobiographies reported that few encouraged their children to read the paper, 46 percent of the students reported in the survey that their parents encouraged them "strongly" or "somewhat" to read newspapers when they were growing up. Nearly all parents (90 percent) encouraged their children to read books, according to the survey; but only a few autobiographers reported that a parent read to or with them, or asked them to read aloud, from the newspaper:
Sitting down on the love seat together, Mom would start with "The Peanuts" and wouldn’t stop until we’d finished Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, reading even my least favorite ones like Tarzan. —a white female habitual reader
I can remember several instances of my daddy asking me . . . to read the front page of the Chicago Tribune to him in the morning, while he shaved in front of the mirror. —a white female occasional reader
But for many of the students, the newspaper was the source of conflict. Eight students recalled being angry at parents who engaged in this adult activity. From an early age students resented that their parents spent time with the newspaper, rather than paying attention to them. Even some of the positive memories were poignant clues to disappointment.
. . . my grandfather would read her the funnies while she looked at the pictures. Often, when he would read Sniffles or Nancy and Sluggo, he would substitute my mother’s name. My mother would get upset and say, "Come on, Dad! It doesn’t say that!" My folks never read me the paper. —a white male frequent reader
The newspaper seemed to be an obstacle between my parents and I . . . . I just remember times when I wanted to talk to my parents, but they were more interested in the paper than me. It made me feel like an outsider. Especially when they discussed the news of the day. —a white female frequent reader
The newspaper was for adults only, according to nearly half (46 percent) of the autobiographies, a symbol of adulthood:
Watching TV as a child, I remember newspapers on television were a sign of a businessman or intellectual. . . . I saw these things but never really thought these people read the paper. I never considered that newspapers contained important, recent information. On the television screen and even in our house they seemed to me just props, things that were supposed to be there to make the scene, our lives, complete. —a white female habitual reader
There was a long period of time when I considered papers as difficult and designed for the minds of adults. Newspapers were written for those in society that had money. And in this society adults have all the money. I felt that newspapers weren’t for me and I wasn’t for newspapers so I never read them. —a minority male frequent reader
The occasional student reported imitating parents by pretending to read the paper, but the form of the paper itself presented problems: The pages are too large and won’t stay together for children. This makes the newspaper useful as a drop cloth or tool but inaccessible as information:
The other local paper was the standard form . . . . I hated that paper because it was so difficult for my short arms to turn the pages to look at the pictures. —a white male habitual reader
The newspaper also defined power relationships and dynamics in the home. Access went to men first, then women, then older or stronger or male children, and so forth. Thirty-nine of the autobiographies explicitly stated that fathers laid first claim to the newspaper. Some children were punished for first use. Other students reported fighting with siblings over the funny papers.
In almost all of the autobiographies, the newspaper was a non-event — like breathing, always there but rarely acknowledged, or like time itself, marking other events, pervasive but ultimately ignored. A few students made the connection to time explicit or identified the newspaper with the flow of history:
As I recall, I associated the newspaper with the summer months. It was in the summer that I would wait for parents to arrive home. The paperboy would always deliver the newspaper right before my mother arrived home. To me, it symbolized a time of day. —a minority female occasional reader
It was then that I noticed a strange thing that my mother did with newspapers, at least it seemed strange to me at the time. Around the time I was doing my work, President Reagan was shot. I noticed that my mother took the newspaper from that day and put it in that same closet where my projects were. Soon I discovered that she had kept several papers there, including the paper from the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. I asked her why she did that, and she said that she wanted to keep these papers because they were a part of her history. —a white female occasional reader
But for the most part, the students discounted their daily encounters with the newspaper, usually because the variety of uses at first excluded information. Newspapers are for getting facts, they seemed to say, and anything else doesn’t qualify as a real use of the form.
Students reported both external and internal motivations for using the newspaper during their school years. As the students entered middle childhood, their parents began to pressure them to read the newspaper. Some reported that the experience was negative:
When I became a pre-teen I remember my father always getting on me about reading the paper. —a minority female occasional reader
Yet the way she would tell me would be in the form of a yell. Quite strange, but it was true. It made it sound like somewhat of a punishment because of the manner in which she used to tell me to read. Yelling, like I caused or got into trouble for something I’ve done. —a minority female occasional reader
Unfortunately, they were not very positive in encouraging me. More often than not, their encouragement took the form of guilt or insults. —a white female habitual reader
Thirty students also reported several types of assignments that required consulting the newspaper to follow current events or the stock market for classes or to earn Boy Scout merit badges in civics or business. Some students who complained of coercion nevertheless became interested in civic affairs and regular newspaper readers. But they did not see the coercion as the cause of their later interest. At the time, they still considered the newspaper boring, and some recounted the ways in which they avoided assignments. These introduce an element repeated in a number of autobiographies: confessions of dishonesty or cheating.
Instead of reading the paper, I would simply find ten words from the dictionary at random and write down the definitions. —a minority female frequent reader
I, being the lazy eighth grader I was, called my father, who was a stock broker, toll free, thus avoiding the use of newspapers at least half the time. —a white male frequent reader
The students also found internal motivations for using the newspaper, generally to make money. Besides the paper route, recycling was mentioned frequently. A few referred to a parent’s newspaper income. One white male habitual reader reported his own enterprise:
I would scrounge up a quarter and duck into a corner restaurant that had a newspaper dispenser. After inserting my quarter I took all the remaining newspapers and trudged off to school. Outside, on the playground, I would sell all of my extra papers to other students who had also forgotten about our Friday assignment. Sometimes I would make five dollars! — my first experience with the paper as a profit-making tool, you might say.
The constant encounters with the newspaper — rolling them for delivery, bundling them for recycling — occasionally led to an interest in the content, but usually not. Most students found the news completely unrelated to their lives. A few reported losing interest even in the comics, but others said that comics were the only newspaper content to hold their interest during this middle period of youth:
Comics were, and still are, the most important and satisfying part of the newspaper for me. I’m sure you’re cringing in disgust right about now, so allow me to lay one thing to rest: "Personally, newspapers are little more than vehicles for the funnies." There, it’s out. —a white male occasional reader
The students’ apologetic tone reflects the assumption that newspapers are for reading facts and information. The one type of content that intrinsically motivated them to pick up the newspaper was not considered valid.
In contrast to the money grubbing, duplicity, and boredom students associated with newspapers, one news event stood out — the time the student’s own picture or name first appeared in the newspaper. Making the news was a specifically remembered and valued moment, unless it happened often, as it did for some students who were sports stars. A minority female habitual reader wrote —
But by the end of that year, I, myself, was in the newspaper story for the very first time. That led me to start skimming through the other sections of the paper. I still was not really "reading" it, but I was at least interested in all the photos and large, bold print headings.
When the students themselves or people and places they knew or cared about were included in the news content, they responded by reading intently and scanning for similar items. Some students identified local news that connected their lives to the larger world as an important cause of their regular interest in newspapers.
TopFor many students, the newspaper was an image closely tied to maturity. Their autobiographies were sometimes built around a central struggle to achieve adulthood.
I was just genuinely glad that I was past the [sixth grade] level that newspapers were written at — for some reason it was very important to me to be able to read the paper . . . —a minority female frequent reader
I don’t know about the other kids in my class, but having my own copy of the newspaper made me feel real grown-up. —a white female occasional reader
The students denigrated any use for newspapers that was not purely informational, implying that the correct use for them is reading hard news. Nineteen autobiographies explicitly defined the newspaper as a repository of facts. The students could excuse themselves for not reading the news at an early age, but as they got older they became very uncomfortable with their failure to use the newspaper as information. Fifty-five of the essays describe specific attempts to use the newspaper as a young adult, but with mixed success.
Information was at the core of the students’ attitudes toward newspapers because they believed that "not knowing the facts" excluded them from readership. The newspaper was a closed system of knowledge, accessible only to adults who had enough information to understand it:
Every once in a while, I tried to pick up a newspaper and read some of it. Unfortunately, due to my lack of knowledge in many of the events, past and present, of our world, I found it very difficult to follow the articles especially on the front page of the paper. —a minority female occasional reader
A repentant attitude for not reading content sometimes led to a sort of baptism into adulthood. The pattern of guilt springing from parental nagging, cheating in school, and self-criticism for "misusing" the newspaper led in eleven cases to a climax somewhat akin to religious conversion.
The catalyst for change varied. Occasionally it was a class project or parental example. A few reported that the space shuttle explosion caught their interest. One minority female frequent reader explained that television coverage led to reading a related newspaper account:
I came across a headline that interested me. It was about child abuse. This was something I had heard about on television, and because I was familiar with the subject, I decided to read the article.
I felt proud of myself that I had read something from the "front" pages of the newspaper, this was something I’d
never done before. I was stunned from the content of the article . . . .
This was a breakthrough for me. I began to read more articles, if the article interested me.
The experience seems to have the attendant self-righteousness of religious conversion. Once they became readers, students couldn’t believe some people don’t read the newspaper:
For the first time in my life, I actually felt well-informed about the important changes occurring in the world. . . . I found myself preaching to others about what I was learning, and I also felt disappointment and frustration upon discovering how ill-informed others are about people, places, and events which I now saw as important knowledge that everyone should possess. —a white female frequent reader
The feelings students expressed toward newspapers and non-readers after the conversion reveal what the newspaper signified for them. They considered themselves smarter and more worldly — that is, adults:
The feelings I associate with newspapers are mature, adult, intelligent feelings. I feel I am old enough and smart enough now to read the paper and learn about world occurrences unlike some lower-class, uneducated people who aren’t concerned with the rest of the world — only their lives and happiness. —a white female habitual reader
It sounds a bit strange but I think of an elite group when I picture someone reading a quality paper. I feel that more educated people read papers while the less educated just sit back and watch the news on television. —a white female frequent reader
For other students the process was less dramatic; they conquered one section (such as comics) at a time or one type of content (such as sports) or form (such as pictures). Some students started by reading everything, but that strategy quickly dropped away, and they ended up picking and choosing according to taste and personal interest. Very few reported reading only hard news.
Those who had integrated the newspaper into their lives nonetheless continued to express frustration with the form, their complaints focusing on waste and economy:
I read it from cover to cover, or at least flipped through the pages, because I wanted to get my money’s worth. —a white female habitual reader
I would like to subscribe to a larger paper, but I cannot afford to pay for fifty more pages of print that I have not the time to read on a daily basis. —a white female occasional reader
But they were also habituated. A few compared reading a newspaper to watching a soap opera. Several mentioned the discomfort they felt upon missing a day’s newspaper. Some said they felt embarrassed about their addiction, but they hated to miss a day.
Today, it is a regular habit to read the morning news. The only time I deviate from this routine is on vacations. Even then I feel almost "left behind" from the progressing world. Information is the key to success, and I plan to be very successful. —a white female habitual reader
However, many of the students had not made the transition and remained "outsiders," unable to decode the form and struggling with the notion that reading the paper meant reading all of it. If everything in the paper was equally important and valuable, they remarked, then there was too much, and they didn’t know how to pick and choose. A white male frequent reader wrote —
The sheer volume of the Times intimidates me, however, and I often avoid it because of this. I don’t know if my roommate reads all of it, but I would doubt it, because I don’t see how anyone could read that much each day and still find time for homework.
Other students acknowledged their limited use of newspapers but considered skimming sufficient. Or they simply rejected newspaper reading or keeping informed as an important activity:
I do not care much about what is happening in other parts of the world. That kind of information does not interest me because I live in Homewood, Illinois, not Moscow! —a minority female occasional reader
Quite frankly, world economics, politics, and foreign affairs don’t interest me, so I don’t read articles relating to these topics. Perhaps in time I will. —a male occasional reader
Some non-readers, however, expressed a determination to change. A few, like this white female habitual reader, reported forcing themselves to read the paper daily in an effort to acquire the habit:
I seem to have a great lack of motivation when it comes to actually reading and paying attention to what I am reading. I would like to change this about myself, because I think it is important to understand what is going on in the world. My outlook on newspapers throughout my life has been virtually negative, and I am looking to make it positive.
The students were for the most part not aware of the sexual politics surrounding newspaper use, although several remarked on the family pecking order mentioned earlier. One white female habitual reader noted that at school only boys read newspapers in study hall. The newspaper was sometimes explicitly identified as a male domain, adopted by one white female frequent reader to please a boyfriend.
Occasionally, a student expressed resentment toward the structure of power relationships reflected in the newspaper. But even those who were hostile to the newspaper or who didn’t read it assumed that others paid attention, and so the medium retained some significance:
Newspaper reading has affected my knowledge of the world because the U.S. government has proven to be corrupt based on power, world domination, and most of all, white supremacy. —a minority male habitual reader
Many students conveyed the attitude that the newspaper was not important to them or their current lives. Twenty-three of them specifically denied the newspaper’s influence. A white male occasional reader wrote —
I think that I can truly say, without error, that I have never changed my style of dress, my speech patterns, or a single strand of hair on my head because of something that I read in the paper. . . . Perhaps it is sad, but the paper really means very little to me — and, I believe, many of my peers.
Despite the denials, however, fifty-seven of the autobiographies recounted at least one specific case of the newspaper’s influence, involving choices of clothes worn, movies and television watched, and purchases made. Some students also reported imitating personal hygiene and dating activities suggested by newspapers. Others recounted specific experiments occasioned by newspaper reading:
It directed me set throw pillows in a circle with two candles and Chinese food. I thought it was a sure win. . . . Well, I got the date but it was nothing like the article. We were exact opposites and I didn’t even like Chinese food. I later thought how one little article influenced me to go through so much trouble. —a white female frequent reader
Twenty-two students ended their stories of entering adulthood by expressing a growing skepticism or even cynicism toward newspapers, complaining about abuses of power or being desensitized by news coverage. A few cited examples of news that victimized or endangered its subjects. Some pointed to their own experiences with unreliable or incorrect news:
. . . the seriousness of this charge was blown clearly out of proportion and caused a lot of worry for a lot of people. It reminds me that the media play an important part in victimizing the individual. —a white male frequent reader
I felt that I knew so much more of what was going on behind the scene of the trial itself than what was actually printed in the newspaper . . . . not giving the entire story was just as bad as giving the wrong story. This was when I realized the great power of the printed media. —a white female occasional reader
These strong reactions emerged when the news touched their lives. News connected with things close to them could also have a powerful positive effect. Students reported that reading the newspaper helped build empathy and prompt behavior change. The key was how the news affected their emotions:
When I read that . . . 90 percent of the women on campus are afraid to walk alone at night, then I changed my behavior. Whenever I am walking home at night I cross the street to avoid passing women whether they are alone or with someone else. —a white male frequent reader
One minority male frequent reader gave an extended account of how newspapers affected his political thinking. But many students were unwilling to acknowledge that newspapers influenced their opinions. It is important to note, however, that they did not consider using facts or evidence from the newspaper in conversation as a form of influence.
Most made an implicit distinction between their own behavior and attitudes and the facts found in newspapers. Their logic went something like this: The newspaper couldn’t influence them because it supplied only factual information — whether on dating activities, such as information on movies, dining, and concerts; or on planning purchases, such as stores, sales, and styles; or on being a citizen, such as politicians, taxes, and public policies. Facts are objective and outside the realm of influence. The newspaper is thus like a telephone book or a card catalog — useful but not influential.
Besides the uncritical stance, what is striking in their essays is the high level of contradiction. Many students denied the influence of newspapers immediately before or after describing memorable examples of that influence:
I have never imitated anything that I read in the newspaper. I may have copied some clothing or make-up styles, but that is about it. —a minority female occasional reader
Sometimes I will feel very sad and somber if I read an article about someone who had died in an accident of some type. . . . After reading these types of articles I . . . am cautious and aware of how I am driving. . . .
Newspapers have never affected my behavior, at least not to my knowledge. —a white female habitual reader
. . . the newspaper has made me angry . . . Articles . . . have made my blood boil. I disagree with the content . . . . reading the paper relaxes me.
The newspaper really hasn’t affected my behavior at all. . . . I have never been influenced by the newspaper on dates except in that I have used it as a source of what to do on a date . . . . I have, however, imitated the newspapers in that I have taken a position on an issue, used the facts I obtained from the paper, and argued much like an editorial writer would. Otherwise, I do not mimic the newspaper in any way. . . . This medium doesn’t
influence my life that much. —a white female occasional reader
The newspaper itself embodies a contradiction: It is a lowly object that confers status. One white female habitual reader said that newspaper stories offer more depth than television, but then she reported skimming only the headlines. The object as an icon, not the facts gleaned from it, made the difference. A white female frequent reader said she felt more intelligent after completing the autobiography because she had found herself more connected with the newspaper than she had realized. Others voiced a new recognition of the newspaper’s ritual significance:
I didn’t realize how important newspapers are to me until I wrote this essay. To me, they have always been a part of my life, and like most things you grow up with, the role they play in your life is not always apparent. —a minority female frequent reader
These young adults’ reports about how they acquired the newspaper habit are consistent with survey data for the general population at their age. Their newspaper use charts their social growth from an early interest in comics through the transition into young adulthood. This study offers more detail than the survey method and more insight into the students’ perceptions. They appear to experience the newspaper in three ways: as a ritual, as a symbol, and as a tool.
Rituals mark the passing of time and place events into the cycle of life and the round of history. The students’ earliest recollections — "we always used to . . ." — signal the ritualistic quality of newspapers. But ritual’s power is masked by routine. After denying much of a role for newspapers, the students recounted many ways in which newspapers in fact punctuated their lives, even though these activities were not granted much status. Only after experience, or in some cases reflection, did the newspaper ritual come to seem significant. Habituated students expressed discomfort at missing a day’s news, and others regretted not reading the paper regularly. For some students, writing the autobiography illuminated and resolved the contradiction between their belief that newspapers are unimportant and their daily experiences with the form.
As a symbol, the newspaper refers to adultness. The students noted how its size, for example, excluded them in childhood, when they identified the newspaper as a prop for grown-ups. Some imitated their parents reading and others expressed resentment at being excluded. During the school years, when parents and teachers urged maturity on them with the newspaper, and they resisted by cheating on newspaper assignment — in essence, refusing to grow up.
This symbolic function might also reveal the structure of power relationships; respondents associated the newspaper with conflict involving parents and siblings. The newspaper became the focus of the students’ struggle to achieve adulthood. Those who used the newspaper to achieve adult status expressed disdain for non-readers. For both readers and non-readers, the newspaper conferred status merely by being possessed.
Unlike symbols, tools are assumed to be neutral and functional, the interface with a physical world. The students reported many ways in which the newspaper, as a physical entity, was a tool in their early years for cleanliness, obedience, order, and crafts. During the school years, the newspaper played an important role as an implement for entertainment and for making money. After the transition to young adulthood, the newspaper became a tool for daily information, and the students predictably entered into a practical critique of its cost and efficiency.
Utility is inherent in the definition of the newspaper as a source of facts necessary to citizenship. The students, for the most part, echoed that definition. But their experience with the newspaper as a symbol, ritual, and tool seemed to contradict the wisdom of the accepted definition, leaving the students in a quandary.
One difficulty must lie in the definition of facts. If it takes facts to understand the newspaper, then one might reasonably suggest (as some conservative critics do) that students be required to learn and remember more. But which facts are important? News from Washington, for example, is foreign and meaningless to these students. What does interest them is the people and places they know. As long as their facts and the newspaper’s facts remain mutually exclusive sets, they are unlikely to become readers.
A second difficulty lies in the definition of citizenship, the context that makes news facts meaningful. Although they seek acceptance into the adult world, students must first be citizens of their families, neighborhoods, and schools. They are less prepared, if not unwilling, to make sense of municipal and state politics, because they cannot translate those events into the context of their lives. Newspapers have little appeal when they fail to validate the smallest jurisdictions, where citizens live out their lives.
The future of an informed citizenry is thus a quandary made from the elements of narrative. It is not only that the news largely tells the story of white, middle-class males, but that it depends on a framework or context foreign to the students. News invokes the ideal or mythology of the individual as a power in democracy and as a creator of society. Students don’t see themselves as citizens, participating in democracy; they are more likely to see themselves as consumers seeking pleasure in the way that the entertainment media position audiences. Nor does the move toward imposing large "issues" to explain facts and events speak to these young people. Their lives, and their stories, exist without any reference to these "issues" or newspaper meta-narratives about public affairs.
For the past ten years, when newspaper executives have acknowledged that young adults seem uninterested in "hard" news and prefer comics and "soft" news, they have tended to use soft news in an effort to make the "hard" news more palatable. By failing to address the underlying definitions of news facts and citizenship, this response fails to engage young adults’ interest in civic and public affairs. It is a purely cosmetic solution. The pattern can be seen not only in the addition of soft features and children’s "mini-pages" that are mostly fluff, but also in the move toward newspaper designs that are decorative and superficially attractive, mimicking television, which is a prime source of entertainment. To change how young adults experience the newspaper, we need to try a different tack.
One might be to find a way to help young people see themselves as participants in public life, with the power to determine its course. This would require a fundamental redefinition of facts and citizenship. The old categories of news (white heterosexual males in government, business, and sports) and features (women, children, and various minorities in homes, neighborhoods, churches, schools, and clubs) would be eliminated. The news that matters to young adults would no longer be classified as "other," segregated into a page or section and assigned the lowest position in the visual hierarchy — notably missing from the front page, for example. Stepp (1991) has reported that a number of newspapers have already opened up the definition of news by inviting readers to call in with their feedback and by running focus groups for non-readers. The result has been a move to put lifestyle issues on the front page and to include the small "chicken-dinner" items readers submit.
Another tack might for journalists to tell stories that connect with the lives of young adults. At least since the 1960s, the "new journalists" have sought to change how hard news is written. As Maynard (1988) recently wrote, journalists should cast stories in a narrative style that places facts in a meaningful — that is understandable and memorable — context. This style would necessarily provide a more subjective, personalized framework. In the place of the sterile "objectivity" of modernism, it would assert the validity of the subjective experience of both the writer/journalist and the reader/citizen.
These new tacks respond directly to the subjective experiences of young adults with the newspaper. They also respond to the call for an informed citizenry by expanding the notion of citizenship to include the the social institutions outside politics as traditionally conceived. These changes might better enable young people to connect their own lives with the larger public discourse. By defining knowledge as internal and personal, journalism would shift its emphasis from creating marketable stories by exploiting the experiences of sources to sharing narratives and expanding the public discourse to include all citizens, especially the young.
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Kevin G. Barnhurst is a Research Fellow at the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center, Columbia University. Ellen Wartella is Research Professor at the institute of Communication Research, University of Illinnois, Urbana–Champaign. The authors would like to thank Earl Dowdy and Haydee Seijo-Maldonado, doctoral students at Illinois, for help with data analysis. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication annual convention, Boston, August 1991.