'News Schmews’ Say Teenagers

By Staff -- School Library Journal, 9/1/2007

If you think teens are more into their iPods than current events, you’re right. A new study shows that most teens could care less about what goes on in the world around them and have no interest in reading the newspaper.

The study, based on a national sample of 1,800 teens, young adults, and adults, found that 28 percent of teens pay almost no attention to daily news. An additional 32 percent were “casually inattentive” to news from just one source.

Overall, 60 percent of teens are considered inattentive to daily news, compared to 48 percent of young adults and 23 percent of older adults, says “Creative Destruction,” released by Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and available here.