Etiket generation gap

Aslı TUNÇ In the beginning of every academic year, I ask my students where they get their news from and how many of them actually buy a newspaper. In the last eight years of my teaching at Bilgi, fewer and fewer hands rise for purchasing of newspapers and more hands for the online news sources. I take this as a definite sign of my aging. I should better accept the fact that the generation gap exists and that reality is hard for me to absorb. I am from a generation where I need to begin the day with a hard copy of a newspaper on my door mat although this does not prevent me to read a bunch of other sources and newspapers online. While I was reading the Pew Research Center’s 2008 news media consumption survey a few days ago, I came across the recent data on how American youngsters turn to the Internet for their news. Fewer young people are reading print newspapers while the percentage of college students who read newspapers online is growing rapidly. The report indicates the balance between online and print readership changed substantially between 2006 and 2008. Actually the most interesting analysis was about the generation gap. 21% of “Generation X” (born between 1965 and 1976) read only a print newspaper, or both an online and a print newspaper; 18 % read a newspaper only on the Web, or both online and in print. In 2006, 30 % of Gen X read a newspaper in print, while just 13 % read a web version. So there is a sharp decline in readership of print newspapers in the last two years. How about Generation Y (born 1977 or later)? In 2008, nearly equal percentages in Generation Y (born 1977 or later) read a newspaper […]