The Unreachables
How print media is coping with Generation Y

by Kimball Bennion

In June 1996, the online news magazine Slate.com launched its inaugural issue amid a flurry of optimism. It boasted itself as a pioneer of sorts, and it had a right to. Slate was a new kind of animal: a news magazine born entirely from the Web. Traditional print media had a Web presence too, but it was pretty bare bones.

Photo Illustration by Steel Brooks and Justin Franz

Slate, on the other hand, was owned by Microsoft, easily one of the most influential names in the brave new world of the “digital revolution.” It had also partnered with Time magazine and (just in case you forgot this was 1996) Starbucks. Time had exclusive permission to reprint Slate’s articles in its own publication, and for only $3, readers could buy the monthly Slate on paper at any Starbucks location in the United States.

The content itself would be snappy, conversational and timely, all for a yearly subscription fee of $19.95. It would capture the attention of the newly emerging Generation Y, who showed much more promise for advertisers than their slacker, politically inactive Generation X predecessors.

GenY would grow up right alongside the Internet with their affluent Boomer parents’ cash in their hands. In 10 years, these Reagan-era babies would be in college and in the workforce, they’d turn to the Web as their source of smart, timely news and analysis, and they’d pay money to get it.

This is what founding editor Michael Kinsley wrote in his inaugural column: “We intend to take a fairly skeptical stance toward the romance and rapidly escalating vanity of cyberspace. We do not start out with the smug assumption that the Internet changes the nature of human thought, or that all the restraints that society imposes on individuals in ‘real life’ must melt away in cyberia … Part of our mission at Slate will be trying to bring cyberspace down to earth.”

Translation: You know how you can get everything for free off the Internet? Well not from us.

Fast forward two and a half years to an announcement from Kinsley on Feb. 14, 1999. Slate certainly made a name for itself in that time, but it faced stiff competition from other upstarts like Salon.com that didn’t charge a penny. It seemed as though Kinsley and the rest of the Slate team realized that their utopian vision of paper — Bill Gates and lattes — wasn’t exactly panning out like they’d hoped. It was time for Kinsley to bow to the inevitable.

“Effective today,” he wrote, “all current editorial content will be free.”

Of course, there was the “why?” Why can’t this exciting new breed of online journalism break even? What’s the missing ingredient? Kinsley offered up an explanation that got to the heart of it: People don’t read news on the Internet like they do when it’s printed. They surf, they jump and they don’t hang around for long, even if it’s a website they like, Kinsley explained.

“This appears to be in the nature of the Web and not something that is likely to change. And it makes paying for access to any particular site a bigger practical and psychological hurdle,” he wrote.

Which brings us to today, and to those Generation Y kids everyone was so hopeful about. They grew up remembering a scarce amount of news that was anything but free. And as this group of Americans, around 80 million strong, begins voting, going to college, spending money, and caring about what is going on in the world, they naturally gravitate to the most expedient way of getting the information they care about — for free and in an instant. The bad news is that they’re doing it at the expense of the news sources they get it from.

Generation Y is on the brink of being America’s decision-makers and trend setters, and if the election of 2008 was any indication, they’ll be shaping the political landscape for a long time as well, which leaves the Goliaths of print media biting their fingernails and wondering: How are we supposed to make any money off of these guys?

That’s a question that more than just news media has become obsessed with. Generation Y is the most studied age demographic ever by market researchers. The dates tend to vary, but a generous estimate of GenY birth years begins at approximately 1977 and goes through 1997. These are people who were raised in a period of unprecedented parental coddling. They were strapped in car seats, rode their bikes with helmets and got it drilled into them to never talk to strangers. Yet for such a protected childhood, Generation Y also came of age during some pretty uncertain and scary times.

Defining generational moments would be the O.J. Simpson trial, the Oklahoma City terrorist attack, the Lewinsky scandal, the Columbine school shooting, a presidential election that was ultimately decided by the Supreme Court, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, dual wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression.

How do you identify with a group of kids who have already been through so much? It’s a losing battle to try and assign one overarching characteristic to an entire age group, but market researchers are giving it their best shot. The consensus seems to be somewhere along the lines of the following generalizations.

Members of Generation Y are affluent and spends lots of their own or their parents’ money, even during a recession. They’ve been raised to embrace community and teamwork more than individuality. Because of this, they’re more likely to jump onto trends or embrace products because their friends and peers also endorse it, not because a faceless ad told them to.

Given the staggering realities they’ve seen growing up, they have a keen sense of authenticity, which makes them very aware of insincere marketing strategies. Most of them have faith in the government’s ability to do things, and are more likely to vote Democrat than Republican.

Perhaps the most defining characteristic is their familiarity with technology. They grew up in homes with a computer and an Internet connection. Most of them own cell phones and have social network profiles that they check regularly.

This is an unwieldy group, and many advertisers have ruefully labeled Generation Y as the “unreachables.” But before we go on any diatribes about kids today, let’s also remember that the rising generation is far from being disconnected.

A Pew Research Center poll from 2008 shows that 27 percent of young adults surveyed (those born after 1977) said that they read a newspaper “yesterday,” or the day before they were surveyed. Thirteen percent said they read a print version exclusively, and 11 percent said they got it from an online version exclusively. Three percent said they got it from both.

Compared to 2006 data, the number of GenY readers who said they read a newspaper the day before was down, but only by two percentage points. The real difference was in the number of respondents who said they’d gotten their news exclusively from either print or online. GenY readers who read only from print made up 20 percent in 2006, while online-only readers were at 7 percent.

In only two years, the news media have seen that coveted market and their future readership make a steady migration to Web-only content, where most of the stories are free. Unless, like in the case of the 2008 elections, what’s on the newsstands is something they really care about.

The year 2008 was an unusual one for politics, but it was just as unusual for print media. Amid slumping newsstand sales from previous years, weeklies suddenly got a taste of the upward slope during the elections, and a lot of the people buying were college students.

Trade publications were simply buzzing in December of that year when Advertising Age revealed Time magazine to be the favorite magazine — news or not — among 1,000 college students surveyed. The honor went to Cosmopolitan the year before. CNN.com also managed to make it into the top 10 favorite websites, as 2007 favorites PerezHilton.com and CollegeHumor.com were ousted.

The unexpected ranking came as a surprise, said Time Marketing Director Steve Cambron.

“I’m not aware of any specific initiative that drove that status, except to speculate that our coverage of Barack Obama and last year’s election engaged a lot of young people who may have been more likely to pick up the magazine than they normally would be,” Cambron wrote in an e-mail interview.

Tom Anderson, the managing partner of Anderson Analytics, which conducted the survey, also attributed this rise in print media’s credibility among college students to the 2008 elections. Even during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in previous years, the survey didn’t reflect much of an interest in politics or world affairs, he said in the Ad Age article. “I think Obama just really struck a chord with them,” Anderson said.

So he did. In 2008, Obama’s face graced the cover of just about every magazine imaginable, from Vibe to Rolling Stone. Time featured him on the cover a whopping 14 times, including as its Person of the Year. Newsweek trailed by only two.

Obama helped spur newsstand sales after many publications put out special commemorative editions after the November election. Of course, this wasn’t due to interest in Obama from young people only, but it was no secret during the election season that the Obama campaign had a firm hold on the youngest voting demographic, and the big news magazines seemed to want a piece of that pie too. In fact, when Time named Obama its Person of the Year for 2008, the issue became Time’s biggest selling single issue in its history. It sold nearly five times as many issues as most at around 575,000.

But as the afterglow of the election and inauguration has subsided, publications are going to need a more permanent strategy to keep younger audiences interested. Most magazines are betting on Apple’s latest device, the iPad. Released in April, the iPad is an electronic reader with a touch-screen interface and a vast potential for interactivity. Publishers such as Time, Inc. and Condé Nast are already boasting prototype editions of some of their magazines that can be used on the iPad. Some of those magazines include Condé Nast’s The New Yorker and Wired and Sports Illustrated. More are sure to follow.

With the iPad, publishers are looking to generate a new kind of experience based on interactivity and reader-oriented control over content, two established habits of the average GenY news consumer.

Nowadays, Slate seems to have caught on to that concept: “Our readers rely on Slate for a perspective they can’t get elsewhere. Loyal, engaged and active online and off — they keep us on our toes. Slate users are opinionated, influential, engaged, active, affluent, tech-savvy, political, outdoorsy, film-buff-y, intellectual, literate and green … Our readers want to engage with our content, with our talent and with each other.”

This might seem like a pretty glowing description of just about any metropolitan, left-leaning age group, but this description comes from Slate’s media kit, an introduction to potential advertisers about the market they’ll be able to reach.

The point of Slate’s pitch to advertisers is to attract companies that have done their homework on Generation Y and are looking for a place to reach them.

The digital revolution that Kinsley and company tried so hard to capitalize off of has so far established the norm that online news will be free. A few sites, most notably the Wall Street Journal’s wsj.com, and, starting in January 2011, the New York Times’ nytimes.com, do charge to read some content online, but they’re still the exception rather than the rule.

People like Kinsley know all too well that charging for online news just doesn’t work, at least not while Generation Y is calling the shots. And unless it’s a rare case like a transformative and historical presidential election, you won’t see a lot of Generation Y hanging around at newsstands either. But is the choice between dead trees and the glare of a computer screen the only one publications have in capturing this market? What if there’s something beyond that? What if it’s a mixture?

What if it’s the iPad? Or what if it’s something like what Esquire magazine did last December: an “augmented reality” issue that featured ads and articles that could interact with readers via their computers if they held the magazine up to a webcam. Some dismissed it as a hokey stunt, but stunts like that have actually caused Esquire’s print circulation to grow by about 38,000 in the past decade to 718,000 total, while its Web-traffic stayed pretty low at 362,000. And, as wildly flashy as it seems, it at least moves some issues off the newsstands.

Generation Y is all about the experience, they say. Well, as the print media answer, let’s hope we can come up with an experience worth buying.