Young Internet users have every excuse to be tired; we’re at the helm of a multi-tasking, 9-tabs-open-in-Firefox world, where nothing stops us from checking our e-mail once a minute while streaming a musician’s MySpace page, updating our Twitter account and working on that project our boss wants by the end of the hour.
Never mind the obvious evidence that multi-tasking is a “menace” we should try to avoid; we seem to instinctively know this already. Young people polled by Context-Based Research Group, who just released a study on news consumption for the Associated Press, said that they crave deeper news stories. They continually refresh headlines and seem to get no further. It’s not for lack of trying, many said.
In 2006 I was on a phone interview for this job. As findingDulcinea’s founder, Mark Moran, explained the concept of the then-nascent site to me, I was immediately struck by the idea of comprehensive news that was, above all, inclusive—not of information, but of people. If our generation becomes culturally illiterate, I thought, it will partly be because old media does not shake hands with new media and start a partnership. If findingDulcinea.com isn’t a way for me to inherit my father’s 30-year legacy at Reuters, I don’t know what is.
The 71-page report for the Associated Press uses an anthropological and ethnographic approach to uncover how young people use news. It profiles many of the survey participants, whose diverse backgrounds and career paths affect their relationship to news in different ways. There was a common thread among these people, all aged 18 to 34: their desire to find more and know more via digital news. This has been findingDulcinea’s mission from the beginning. It’s our approach to every avenue of the Web.
Appropriately, we covered this news milestone in our Beyond the Headlines section. Beyond the Headlines doesn’t tell you what to read on a particular story, but it does give you a range of options for reading that includes a story’s headline, lead (or lede, as news reporters know it), background, and context. We use many sources to gather our information, and these sources aren’t just hyperlinks; they’re concepts, opinions, details and facts. Beyond the Headlines is the section of findingDulcinea.com where, we hope, people in every age bracket will visit to go beyond merely refreshing their favorite news-headline site. That habit, the AP report found, is a “sign of boredom,” but the abundant Internet shouldn’t ever make us bored.
Liz Colville
Senior Writer
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