Television Starts to Court the Young Voter

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Television networks are assigning reporters to a new beat this election year: people who don’t watch the evening news. With polls showing a surge in primary-season ballots cast by voters under 30, media outlets are out to convert the newly energized voters into viewers. On cable news, CNN promotes a “League of First Time Voters” and the Fox News Channel is covering what it calls the Y Factor with a full-time correspondent. On broadcast, NBC has assigned Luke Russert, the son of the late anchor Tim Russert, to the youth vote beat and ABC, CBS and PBS are all running stories by student journalists.

Heather Nauert, a Fox News Channel correspondent, started covering the youth vote in February, one month after exit polls started showing significant spikes in turnout rates. “We basically said, ‘Oh my gosh, this is a big story and we’ve got to cover it,’ ” she said. On Fox, Ms. Nauert’s reports have appeared on the network’s nightly news program “The Fox Report” and were compiled for an hourlong special report, “The Y Factor,” last month.

The big story also gives networks an opportunity to counter two dismal trends in television news: dwindling ratings and aging viewers.

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/18/business/media/18youth.html?th&emc=th