The Scoop on Kids   

How will today’s kids access news when they grow up? Look at how they use the Web.

"To get news you go online, obviously," says 10-year-old Stephanie Danner, "or you watch the TV."

Well, obviously.

Words dropped so casually by a 10-year-old kid might feel like a punch in the gut to a newspaper publisher. On the other hand, when have 10-year-olds ever been enchanted by newspapers? Never. It's not extraordinary that print failed to make Danner's list of favorite news sources, but that the Internet did.

This particular kid is a budding reporter who has had an e-mail account for five years and made that particular statement while serving on a panel at a recent University of California, Berkeley, conference titled "Connecting with the Wired Generation."

Danner pays more attention to journalism than her peers do, but her bond with the Internet is utterly normal. The children and young adults who constitute Generation Y--those born between 1977 and 1994--are spending their formative years surrounded by digital media. As former Xerox chief scientist John Seely Brown explained in his keynote for the March conference, "bits are very close to oxygen" to them. They are the tidal wave that will push digital communication forward.

Eighty-three percent of American 13- to 17-year-olds had Internet access in 2002, according to a study (which included school use) released by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in March. Meanwhile, just 60 percent to 70 percent of adults have Internet access, according to estimates. The Internet is the only news medium used more heavily by young adults than by their elders.

More important than numbers are the ways in which this generation experiences the Internet and how that medium could shape its news habits. Most youngsters aren't looking for news yet; they're doing homework, playing games and chatting with one another. But by investigating how they interact, play and learn, we can predict how they might behave as adults:

• They'll take advantage of choice. Internet and satellite TV users already have a world of media at their fingertips, but it takes a profoundly global story like the war in Iraq to make most Americans tune in to international perspectives. The barriers are cultural, habitual and technological. For Web-savvy kids who already chat with peers around the globe and use search engines that don't discriminate between CNN and the BBC, using both regional and international news sources will come more naturally.

• They'll practice verification by corroboration. No longer tethered to the mainstream news brands, how will Generation Y know what to believe? The kids on the Berkeley panel had a ready answer: Simply hit Google for two more sources. While it's far from foolproof, their corroborative approach to information-gathering distinguishes these news consumers and gives them confidence to venture past their parents' comfort zones.

• They'll be information hunters. The problem with newspapers, in the view of Danner and her cohorts, is that "usually [what I want] is not there." That complaint presupposes that one knows what one wants. As this group comes of age, they will appreciate how leafing through print media can expose them to new ideas--but they'll still enjoy burrowing into the Web. Picture an inclusive media diet, in which people use general news sources and then move to focused, interactive content.

• They will expect to learn by experiencing. A state budget calculator that puts users in the shoes of legislators; a baggage screening simulator; an interactive tour of the human heart: Today's more innovative news sites are already invested in the premise that showing the news is often more effective than telling it. We can expect this form to explode when it comes in contact with a population raised on the Web and complex simulation games.

• They will be discriminating about presentation. As much as they appreciate the Internet, kids are curmudgeons when it comes to cluttered Web sites, annoying ad formats and the rubbish that washes up with every Google search. Many news sites are about as user-friendly as stone tablets. In the usability department, nobody gets a free pass.

For the record, most of the kids on the Berkeley panel (again, not your typical teens) agreed that magazines and newspapers do have a place in their lives. This is not about one medium's supremacy over the others. If Generation Y takes after today's most avid and savvy adult Internet users--who access wide-ranging and hands-on news sites--journalism will have to recalibrate its picture of the average news consumer, both online and off.