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Networks Yearn to Turn Youth Vote Into Ad Dollars

Television networks are desperately trying to capture young viewers that have been spurred to action with this year’s presidential campaigns, The New York Times reports. NBC has Tim Russert’s son Luke Russert on the youth vote beat, while CNN launched a “League of First Time Voters,” and Fox has a full-time correspondent on the "Y […]

StewartTelevision networks are desperately trying to capture young viewers that have been spurred to action with this year's presidential campaigns, The New York Times reports.

NBC has Tim Russert's son Luke Russert on the youth vote beat, while CNN launched a “League of First Time Voters,” and Fox has a full-time correspondent on the "Y Factor" beat. ABC, CBS, and PBS are all running stories by student journalists. But plans to capitalize on the growing political activity of young people are running into a few roadblocks:

Young people are catnip for advertisers, but they mostly shun TV, and especially news broadcasts. A biannual news consumption study released
Monday by the Pew Research Center found that only a third of news consumers younger than 25 watch TV news on an average day. That’s still twice as many as the 15 percent who read a newspaper on an average day.

Around 6.5 million people participated in the primaries and caucuses this year — twice as many as in 2000 — but are they watching news shows? Not really. “NBC Nightly News,” the most popular evening news show right now, brought in 200,000 new viewers this year — only
2,000 of which were between the ages of 18 and 34.

While Howard Dean's 2004 campaign lived and died by the promise of youth voter turnout, pundits and analysts are expecting young people to vote in droves for Obama this year. But as Michiko Kakutani noted in this weekend's evergreen story about The Daily Show's popularity, the kids these days are already getting their television news — from a comedian.

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