A lost generation of newspaper readers? Not necessarily

Not everyone is a fan of the French interventionist model of doing things, but an experiment in France shows that it’s not inevitable that newspapers will soon be met with a lost generation of readers who no longer consume their news in print.

According to a report at the recent World Association of Newspapers conference on Young Readers (via Paul Bradshaw), the French are getting 18-24 year olds into the habit of reading newspapers by giving subscriptions away to them free, once a week.

Jeanne-Emmannuelle Hutin of the Presidential Youth Commission said that there was clearly a lot of debate around the issue, but that her newspaper, Ouest France, had actually been trialling the concept since 2006 and it had been a success.

Ouest France had succeeded in upping the number of 18-24 year old readers by 22,000, and though only 12% had resubscribed once the freebie had expired (though that’s arguably 12% more than would otherwise had been the case), 65% did still read the paper once a week.

However, the lesson from France is that it couldn’t be a case of same old, same old. Special content (for example a jobs section aimed at that market) was produced on the day free subscriptions were distributed, and a ‘new media’ marketing campaign was developed…under the theory that if you want younger consumers to do their reading offline, you need to find them online.

It’s an interesting experiment, and to move younger consumers onto reading in print (whatever the merits of coaxing them to do so) something radical has to be done.

For example, here in the UK I tend to recycle this chart quite a lot (click on image for a larger size). It’s from the most recent communications markets report from Ofcom. Ofcom asked consumers what one media they considered ‘essential.’ Newspapers scored 2% among 16-24 year olds and 4% for adults as a whole (TV was most important across the board).

As an aside, among 16-24 year olds, mobile phones is the second most essential form of media, while for 25-34 year olds it’s the Internet via the good old PC or laptop.