Did Baby-Boomers Have Have A Stranglehold on Newspapers For Too Long?

Joshua Benton

A recent Editor & Publisher article reports concerns among some in the news business that newspapers may be forsaking their most loyal readers - baby-boomers - in an effort to chase readers from Generations X and Y.

The experts in the story fret that by redesigning layouts and shortening stories, papers will lose their baby-boomer audience while still failing to attract 20- and 30-somethings.

Wait a minute - isn't it this kind of thinking that got the news biz into this quagmire in the first place? Wasn't it the failure of newspapers to catch on quickly enough - to the Internet, to a youth culture that had moved on from the Rolling Stones decades ago - that alienated so many young readers to begin with?

That was my theory anyway. As a newspaper junkie all my life, I remember reading papers in the 1980s (I'm 45, at the very tail-end of the boomer generation myself) and wondering why, for instance, the music critics weren't writing about the music I liked (the Clash, Sex Pistols) and instead seemed mired in the 1960s or at least the 1970s.

Then, in the 1990s, it seemed to take forever for papers to catch onto the Internet. I remember being in the newsroom of a major newspaper in 1997, and there was one person - one person - who knew how to surf the web.

Why? Newsrooms were filled with baby-boomers. Their decades-long stranglehold on newspapers led to the industry being in such dire straits now, I thought.

Not so fast, says Joshua Benton, editor of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, where his job is to help the news industry adjust to the Internet era.

Benton, one of the brightest young minds (he's 33) to make a living thinking about the news business, says it wasn't all the boomers' fault.

"Newspapers have never been known for being plugged into youth culture," he said in a recent interview. "I wouldn't lay that at the feet of the boomers; it's not as if in the 1960s the major metro dailies were writing smart, engaging pieces on the Rolling Stones, hippies, and Woodstock. The people who run newspapers have always been conservative in the sense of representing some angle of the establishment perspective of a community.

"If anything," he added, "we have the boomers to thank for the boom in the alt-weekly world, which certainly did a better job of covering the things young people care about than most dailies did."

Benton, who spent 10 years in newspapers and won a slew of awards, says newspapers just aren't built to be cutting-edge.

"I think you could also blame the very structure of newspapers as a mass medium. By their nature -- as institutions designed to appeal to a huge swath of a city's population, and as institutions designed to avoid annoying or shocking subscribers -- they were in a uniquely bad position to cover anything that looked like a niche," he said.

"The nichiest they were willing to get for a while was a "Women's Page." Part of that is technology, the inability to tailor a paper into too many targeted sections. But the bigger part, I think, is the philosophy of a mass medium. Think of ABC/NBC/CBS in the pre-cable days -- when options are limited, everyone had to appeal to a huge, broad audience. Then comes along an MTV, a Nickelodeon, a CNN, which can target one specific audience."

To sum up? "I think a boomercentric worldview is pretty low on the list of reasons for why newspapers are in the shape they're in," Benton said. "It's on the list, but a ways down."