Young Readers

“Information becomes meaningful when it is accompanied by attachment or involvement.” Ms Schaffer thinks that point is important enough to repeat twice.

“You could think of it this way: Future news might well be less about story telling – the stories we journalists want to write, produce or tell – and more about story making – the stories that our consumers are assembling for themselves via their own process of gathering information, sifting through the onslaught of daily info-bits and participating in learning about things.”

This new model has implications for reaching younger readers, who have a natural affinity for the interactivity of the internet that is central to this new way of gathering information, says Ms Schaffer.

Some examples of this interactive journalism:

Blogs, or web logs, which is emerging full force in US journalism. The Spokane Spokesman-Review used blogging to help cover the state-wide high school basketball tournament, drawing hundreds of participants who tracked scores, shared their memories and evaluated the competition. The newspaper has since developed blogs about health, the state legislature, movies and entertainment, local sports.
Tax calculators. New Hampshire’s Public Radio Tax Calculator invited people to input their personal financial information. When they hit “calculate”, they could see exactly what three different tax reform bills would cost them. More than 30,000 people participated.
Budget Balancers. Games developed by news organisation at a time when most states are confronting massive budget deficits. The exercises allowed the public to choose what services they’d cut or what taxes they would raise to balance the budget.
Clickable maps. These interactive maps invited people in South Carolina and Washington to click on an icon, representing a development option, and drag it to a spot on a local map where they would like to see it built. The software tallied their responses and that become the subject of news stories.