News Isn't Wasted on the Young

NEWS ISN'T WASTED ON THE YOUNG
[SOURCE: New York Times 2/18, AUTHOR: David Carr]
On Feb. 5, turnout among that supposedly disengaged demographic aged 18 to 29 doubled in Massachusetts, tripled in Georgia, Missouri and Oklahoma and quadrupled in Tennessee. Barack Obama isn't the only candidate to reach out successfully to young voters, but he owes much of his strength at the polls to a ferocious band of young voters who have broken a path for him in almost every primary. His success did not happen in a vacuum. Youth voting has been rising in each of the last two elections. But there are specific lessons in the Obama phenomenon. He talks about issues young people care about, and while rarely patronizing, uses both classic speaking gifts and a contemporary touch for the pop culture vernacular that resonates to hit the sweet spot with a very tough demographic. Is there room on those coattails for big media? Maybe so. Cable stations whose average demographic looks like the afternoon crowd at the Legion Hall bar are suddenly pulling in young viewers. During the week of Feb. 5 voting, CNN’s ratings among viewers aged 18 to 34 were up 232 percent over the same week in 2004. Fox was up 78 percent, and MSNBC was up a whopping 400 percent (although from a much smaller base). It’s not just the cable stations. Over all, according to Nielsen, ratings for television news programming of all kinds doubled among young viewers on the big night of primaries. A politics application that is a mash-up of ABC News and Facebook has been downloaded by 1.25 million users. Debates have brought in YouTube and Facebook as co-sponsors, and record numbers of young people with them. More than one college newspaper has suggested that “politics is the new black” on campus.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/18/business/media/18carr.html?ref=todayspaper
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