While scanning the headlines at I Want Media, one of my favourite media-news aggregation sites, I came across an interview with Jared Kushner, the 25-year-old who recently bought the New York Observer. For anyone who doesn’t know, the Observer is a pink-coloured tabloid that provides a wonderful mix of politics, art, commentary and other stuff, and has a pretty great website too. Jared is the son of a prominent New York developer, and in addition to owning property himself and studying law and business, he nows runs the Observer.
Unlike many of his fellow twentysomethings, Jared says he has never really gotten into MySpace.com and that he still reads newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal and so on (although he reads many of them online) — so perhaps he’s not really representative of other media consumers in his age bracket. But he makes an important point when asked about how he thinks attitudes toward the media have changed. He says:
“I believe that when it comes to the news, my generation has shorter attention spans and greater expectations. Society and media have evolved to the point where a person has to put forth very little effort to get the news. Rather, the news comes to us. People now expect to be entertained. And if I am not going to provide them with an engaging and cutting-edge product, someone else will.”
A blogger I have come to enjoy named Chartreuse put the same concept in a slightly different (and more poetic) way recently, with this post. The bottom line is that “You have to find old media (what channel? What time? What theatre? What station?). New media finds you.” And most importantly: “Old media is begging for attention. New media is attention.”