After another successful Friends of Maxus event this week I have been left pondering the evening’s topic.  It revolved around the speaker’s belief that “News is the new rock ‘n roll” especially for the youth generation.  The part of the talk that left me intrigued is, if this is true, how has this happened?  Are the youth of today more interested in news than they were ten, twenty, thirty years ago?  I don’t believe that there would be such a shift in such a short space of time. 

However, one thing I do believe though is that the availability of free online short form content may have heightened the youth generation’s interest in news.  An interesting comparison is that the Sun, a popular newspaper, outsells The Guardian, a quality newspaper, by almost 9 to 1.  However, in terms of online, guardian.co.uk has over 2.2m more UK unique users than thesun.co.uk.  The availability of free bitesize news at our finger tips in digestible chunks whether it be video, image or text has revolutionised the way we consume media.  However, with the talk of micro-charging for online content, especially prevalent with NI’s plans to launch the Sunday Times online, is this good thing going to be taken away from us?

Anyway back to my main point.  From this, it has to be said the youth of the today have it pretty sweet.  I’m not going to go into the whole, “back in my day…” (maybe a little), but the modern “yoof” has a mobile, a PS3, a netbook, fibreoptic broadband, a digital camera, a PVR, online bank account, three social network profiles and easy access to any content they want whenever they want.  When I was younger, I had an amiga computer with sensible soccer and a time allowance on the home phone!  Surely the current youth generation can’t look back in fifteen, twenty years and say the same thing can they?

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