The Modern Journalist

For Those Who Think The Word is Dead. Eat It.

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A new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 93 percent of teenagers write for their own pleasure, but fail to connect the relationship between communication writing (anything done electronically) with the more formal structure of writing.

The 83-page report is filled with startling insights:

1. teenagers believe critical and formal writing is tantamount to their success in life; however, they don’t believe that their e-communication prepares them for that
2. 48 percent of parents believe their children write more than they did during school; 20 percent believe their children write about the same
3. That said, the typical high school assignment is only ONE paragraph in length
4. 82 percent of teens believe there should be more writing instruction in school; 72 percent believe there should be more computer-based tool work to help them with their writing.

There’s more, but too much for a blog; that said, there’s a couple things we can take from this.

The first — and I’m always happy to say this — is that Apple CEO Steve Jobs‘ assertion that kids are reading less today is clearly a misplaced sentiment. The fact that they are producing content across multiple mediums just re-enforces the fact that the modern teenager — the modern youth — is more steeped in this information than we maybe imagined.

The second is that kids and teenagers understand the importance of this information and technology. They get that in a participatory world — a Read/Write world — it’s tantamount to success that they learn to both read and write effectively. The people who succeed are the ones who can master both aspects.

The third is that teachers need to adopt technology into their classrooms because that is the medium the kids and teens are using today and we can’t separate one out from the other. For them — in a mash-up culture where ideas (or memes) spread from text to audio to video, swirled into the blogosphere — the words are tied to the various formats they are working with.

It’s the last one that scares me the most. Having spent time in newsrooms and with media types, I continually hear how little they interact with words. There is a belief that technology has destroyed their ability to interact on that level.

The truth is there is an entirely different set of media that are slowly replacing print and paper. We have a generation of kids being told that their work electronically isn’t as valuable as their formal work (where do you think they got that idea from?), while they are longing for teachers to show them how to better improve their communication in a modern environment.

Why should this scare newspapers (and teachers)?

Simply because someone will.