Why A Single 27-Year-Old All-American Male Refused a Free Copy of USA Today: “There’s Nothing In There I Didn’t Read on the Web Before Going to Bed Last Night.”

It started at a father-son breakfast in Orlando, Florida, last week when Dad offered 27-year-old son Kevan a USA Today newspaper that the hotel for some reason had left him two that day.

Well to Dad, who has spent some 30 years of his life selling news products to the newspaper industry that came as a bolt of lightning striking the table between us. And no doubt it was not exactly the desired response marketing folks at USA Today would want to hear – they who dreamed up the tagline for their subscriptions house ad, “ I saw it in USA Today. It’s what people are talking about”

“What do you mean, you don’t read newspapers?” Dad inquired. “There’s absolutely nothing in there that I didn’t read last night before going to bed,” Kevan offered in a tone that showed about as much impatience that Dad asked the question as he having to answer.

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“Ah, but I know you’re still really crazy about sports, so if nothing else take the sports section. Check out the box scores.”

“Dad” – the tone now getting that much more sniffy – “I saw them all last night.”

“Ah, but what about the columns, you didn’t read those last night!” Dad answered defiantly. “No, I may not have read those specific columns but I read columns probably just like them on the same subjects.

“Dad, just face it, newspapers are no longer a part of my life. I still want the news but why wait until Tuesday morning when I can read everything Monday night?”

Dad by now is getting somewhat desperate but then remembers writing about all those statistics put out by newspaper organizations that show that online newspaper sites are frequented by more than one-third of web users looking for news and information.

“Well, if you don’t read the print edition, then at least you go to the Orlando Sentinel’s web site to get the news, then? Dad opined.

“No, about the only time I’ll go to the local newspaper site is when I need to find out the time a movie starts. Otherwise don’t really touch it.”

“Because the broadcast sites usually run the stories much shorter than the newspaper site. It just takes a few paragraphs for the main details of a story and that’s all I want. Go to a newspaper site and you have to wade through too many words to find the information you want.”

“What can I do to persuade you to start reading a newspaper again? I’ll pay the subscription.”

Son, now getting really testy, “Dad, you’re not listening. It’s not the money, it’s the convenience. Why should I wait until the next day to find out everything I want when I can read it the night before? With television you couldn’t say that, but with the web it’s all there. Instantly.”

And what about shopping, surely those newspaper ads would point you in the right direction to save some money? “I do all my looking at ads online. I want some electronics I’ll go direct to the Best Buy or Circuit City sites and see what they have. They even run their newspapers ads right on their own sites.”

“Well, is there some subject matter, anything, that you can’t find on the web that your local newspaper could provide?”

The problem for the newspaper industry is that son Kevan is not alone in his thinking. He says all his buddies all basically do the same thing. It’s not that they don’t want all that information, but rather they have found a more timely and convenient medium to provide it.

Free newspapers have made a huge impact around the world because they are given out to a captive audience – people about to get on public transport to get to work and who have little better to do during that commute than to read something given to them. But if there was no commute – in the case of Kevan he drives the three miles to his work – then one wonders if there would even be a place for a general “free newspaper”.

Statistics show that it is the young who use the Internet the most, but recent figures show that the older generation is finally coming to terms with web access. The thought had always been that as the young get older they would gravitate away from the web and back to print.

Why A Single 27-Year-Old All-American Male Refused a Free Copy of USA Today: “There’s Nothing In There I Didn’t Read on the Web Before Going to Bed Last Night.”

Much has been written about the declining youth readership of newspapers, but it’s not until you actually sit down and talk with a member of that target audience that you realize just how terribly difficult it is going to be for print to get them back.