PressEthic

The Associated Press announced on Monday that they would be introducing a new news product on the web that would be marketed to a young demographic called asap. According to the A.P. press release, “asap's words, pictures, sounds, moving images, blogs and audience-participation features aim to entice the 70 million 18-to-34-year-olds in the U.S. into becoming the next generation of news consumers by drawing them to AP's member sites.”

What is up with those 18-34 year olds, anyway? Yahoo! wants to corner them too. Oh right, they represent a major consumer demographic for advertisers. Apparently, just because asap is geared towards youngsters it doesn’t mean it will be dumbed down. That’s because research has proven that young people (much like old people), want news to be sophisticated and engaging. So what will the major difference be? The reporting will use the word “you” more often (from the NYT, link below). Hopefully this will be the only change in the vernacular, we all remember the CNN debacle when a memo circulated about their intent to slang-ify the news in order to reach the youth culture.

In both the A.P. announcement and articles that I read about the Yahoo! deal, both groups pointed out that they would still be reporting serious news (read: not blogs). As reported in a New York Times article, “the service will not merely offer a youth-oriented version of articles and does not consider itself an alternative wire.” I think that it will be interesting to see both the A.P. and Yahoo!’s new forums, and to watch for the ways in which younger people are being drawn in. It seems that in order for the news to be engaging, it’s going to have to be shorter and punchier and have a lot more images. At this point I feel ambiguous because I think it will be good if more young people start reading the news and are better informed, but I wonder if the content will be compromised in order to reach younger audiences.

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After writing this, I just found that hot zone is up on Yahoo(!).