17th Annual Teen Survey Results

Nilka Rodriguez,14, (left) is a ninth-grader at Aquinas High School in the Bronx, N.Y., who reads the "New York Daily News" at least five days a week. Her father brings it home from work just for her. "I just one day picked up the paper and thought, 'Wow! This is cool,' " says Nilka, who's on her school's track team. "I like telling my parents and my friends what's going on. Now they read the newspaper." Josh Essig, 18, (right) a senior at Pelham (N.Y.) High School who plays football and lacrosse, reads "The Journal News" of White Plains and "The New York Times" every day: "I started off with the sports section and worked my way up to the other sections."

News flash: America's teens read newspapers!

Our exclusive USA WEEKEND survey of 65,000 students delivers some good news on newspapers: Not only do kids read them, but they find them relevant and reliable. Now, if they'd just turn off the TV ...
By Nicholas Lemann

Now, a USA WEEKEND survey of more than 65,000 American teenagers delivers some interesting news: Newspapers have established a substantial beachhead in today's teen culture. According to the magazine's large, if unscientific, survey, a majority of teenagers have a newspaper delivered to their homes and at least see it. The best way to characterize their attitude -- and this is exactly the result one would obtain from an unscientific survey of my own home -- is that they believe in newspapers in theory and expect really to read them one day, but in practice they dip in and out of the more accessible sections. That's promising.

Newspapers belong to a large category in teenagers' lives, which might also include true love, voluntary participation in organized religion, consumption of most forms of non-popular culture, enthusiastic travel to destinations other than theme parks, civic activity and careful life planning: things to be resisted in the short run, but not so much as to take them out of range for the long run. On some unadmitted level, teenagers like it when their parents arrange matters so that such items are in their line of sight -- because then they can resist. Teenagers have a subliminal understanding that these building blocks of adulthood and good citizenship will benefit them later, and that allows them to make a healthy show of ignoring them now.

"The wondrous variety in teenagers' interactions with the newspaper gives rise to qualified optimism." -- Nicholas Lemann is dean of Columbia University's prestigious Graduate School of Journalism in New York.

Still, newspapers do manage to engage teenagers, the survey results show. Journalists like to speak of newspapers in a soaring rhetoric of public service. When we do that, we're not being insincere -- journalism is a profession mainly populated by people who entered it for idealistic reasons. But the truth is that newspapers are more complicated institutions than we sometimes like to let on.

One of a newspaper's functions is to entertain, and the USA WEEKEND survey indicates -- and I can confirm from personal experience -- that teens' most-read part of the newspaper is the comics. Newspapers also report extensively on entertainment, including movies and sports -- and those are both high on the list of teenagers' favorite parts of the newspaper. At the other end of the spectrum, portions of newspapers are devoted to pure, unmediated facts, like the stock tables. Newspapers are community bulletin boards, advertising vehicles, social crusaders, fortunetellers, political actors and pillars of their communities, among other things.

Newspapers physically embody these complexities. They are big and bulky, and the ink comes off on your fingers. Visually they are an unlikely mix of columns of type, dramatic pictures of the great events of the world, swirling weather maps, puzzles, luscious photographs of models (usually, but not always, in the advertisements), charts, cartoons and tables of numbers. The Internet, as a medium, is infinitely capacious, but it presents you with one fairly specific screenful at a time. Television permits you to switch around endlessly, but at every viewing moment you're stuck in the position of a passive recipient of a presentation. Newspapers express the variety of the communities they serve: They have neighborhoods, and many varied points of access, and a reader has total control over the interaction, including the ability to skip, skim, select, read backward, tear out and reuse.

That wondrous variety in readers' interactions with the newspaper gives rise to qualified optimism about the relationship between newspapers and America's teens. For most people, the doorway into newspapers is not the editorial page, or the long, ambitious investigative series -- the parts journalists are proudest of. It's the glance at the front page, the classified ad for a used car, or the contest. As long as there is a relationship, that's a promising start. To get into the habit of checking the headlines and the weather forecast and the movie listings is to start a lifelong relationship that deepens as it progresses.

Teenagers, to judge by the survey, are not entirely different from adults in their approach to newspapers. They read instrumentally, looking for material that is personally useful to them: sections explicitly about teenagers or high schools, movie listings, fashion stories, horoscopes. As they get older, their attention might shift to the help-wanted ads and the community news. But one can spend a lifetime interacting pretty happily with newspapers without ever regarding them as a source of much more than what is personally relevant.

Many people read newspapers that way for as long as they read newspapers. And many people read newspapers just to see the captivating drama of life unfold. Well-known figures win and lose sporting events. Ordinary people have extraordinary things happen to them: adventures, misfortunes and triumphs. Teenagers, of course, have their own dramas to follow, involving young celebrities or athletes, and newspapers provide it: Entertainment (for girls) and sports news (for boys) are high on the list of what they read in the paper. And when something truly epochal happens, a Sept. 11 or a war in Iraq, they often will fill in the news flash from television by reading the more complete account in the newspaper.

It is a social miracle that out of newspapers' often messy and unlovely process of engaging with the public comes the nobility of a free society. It is a similar social miracle that out of the rough clay of teenage culture comes -- well, it's too much to claim nobility for adult culture, but it is at least stable and generally aimed at the higher good. In journalism, newspapers look the most like a free society, because they can do more things at once than other forms. The varied and detailed mass produces something great.

In that way, the paper is a fair miniature version of society entering the homes of most American teenagers every day. The way in which the newspaper gradually draws them in over the years resembles the way the life of the nation does, too.

Our Teen Winners

Teen editors Chase Barton and Alyssa Varner were selected to help edit this special report.

This year's Teens & Newspapers survey received an overwhelming response of more than 65,000 entries with the help of our partners, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the Newspaper Association of America Foundation and YouthNOISE. Four lucky teens won prizes. We selected two guest editors for this issue -- Chase Barton, 17, a junior at Woodrow Wilson High School in Beckley, W.Va., and Alyssa Varner, 18, a senior at Wahlert High School in Dubuque, Iowa. They spent two days in our McLean, Va., offices researching and reviewing surveys for this issue.(Above)

Chase knows his news. His morning begins with two West Virginia papers, "The Register Herald" of Beckley and "The Charleston Gazette." Business, sports and local news occupy most of his time before he dashes off to school. The upshot: He can educate his friends on world affairs. His message to newspapers: "Do more interesting articles that affect teenagers' lives." Although Chase likes to write, he plans to own his own car dealership once he graduates next year.

Alyssa, on the other hand, will study journalism at the University of Iowa in the fall. Every day, she reads the "Telegraph Herald" in Dubuque, where she also volunteers, to check out local news, entertainment, comics and ads. She thinks there are ways to get even more teens interested in newspapers: "If it were entertaining, more teens would read. It's hard to look at a page full of text, like "The Wall Street Journal"! Students read things that are quicker."

Other winners: Tien Pham, 13, a seventh-grader at West Middle School in Holland, Mich., won the Dell Inspiron 1100 notebook computer from the American Society of Newspaper Editors, whose Web site, highschooljournalism.org, nurtures teen journalists. And Alisha Smith, 16, a 10th-grader at McKinley Senior High School in Canton, Ohio, won the Palm Zire 71 from the Newspaper Association of America Foundation, which is dedicated to developing young readers.

-- Winners report by Tameka L. Hicks

Photos: Cover by Peter Freed for USA WEEKEND. Teen Winners by David Baratz for USA WEEKEND