The Fall 2009 Nieman Reports on Journalism and Social Media features Engaging Youth in Social Media: Is Facebook the New Media Frontier? co-written by our research partner Dr. Christine Greenhow: (you can learn more about our research funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation):
Like many young people her age, Jackie, who is 18, admits that she’s not one to put pen to paper, turn the pages of The New York Times, or devour a paperback on a lazy summer afternoon. Yet on a Thursday morning before school, she logged into Hot Dish, a youth-oriented Facebook app that serves up “the hottest climate news.” For Jackie, it’s a go-to social media site within her Facebook network. She goes there, she told us, to “check in to see what articles other people had posted and to read their comments” on thoughts she had shared. Once there, she reads stories about climate change, comments on them, and easily shares news with her friends. She calls this site her “everyday RSS habit,” a place she goes to read and post.
Counter to the decline in young people reading anything printed on paper—whether news or books—is a notable increase in out-of-school online reading and writing through fanfiction (at fanfiction.net, for example) and social networking sites. Yet, according to The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, more than one third of people under 25 get no news on a daily basis. Yet, teens spend many hours each week online—a recent British study estimated the number at 31—especially on Facebook, which is the most-trafficked social media site in the world.
We wondered if young people could be persuaded to critically engage in reading news and conversing about it on Facebook. Would doing this provide them with a sense of community? Furthermore, would their involvement translate into real-world actions or consist solely of virtual activism? And, if we understood better how young people decide how to handle, produce and talk through information online, would we be any closer to knowing how to develop successful media-rich and educational environments?
Read the full report or download the research findings (pdf)
