YOUNG PEOPLE ARE LESS INTERESTED IN TRADITIONAL MEDIA

Research of National Youth Council of Serbia: Main Sources of Informing of Young People are

Facebook and Instagram

Telephones, websites and social networks – primarily Facebook and Instagram are the main sources of information for young people, the research on the problems and needs of young people for the year of 2018, conducted by National Youth Council of Serbia has shown. The results have shown that for them, the printed media almost does not exist, and the interest in television and radio has decreased.

Also, the research of NYCS has shown that young people are usually not informed on the public matters, but that they seek for stories and information which they need in the particular moment. Boban Stojanović from NYCS says that in the last two years, there is the decrease of the need of this part of population to be informed.

“It seems that young people are less and less interested in being informed. They are online on social networks and the research has shown that they want to be informed via social networks, applications, the Internet in general. Older manners of informing like TV and print are losing their significance among young people. However, it is indicative that even though the information are available to them 24/7, a large number of them, more than 50% are informed only sometimes, or are not informed at all”, Stojanović says.

As Youth Radio reports, with this generation, television loses its primate in informing people, and it is interesting that young people who do spend some time on this medium usually watch film and documentary channels, and RTS, Prva and N1 when it comes to traditional channels. Among daily papers, Blic and Danas are read the most and Informer the least, and only 25% of the participants in the research have some of news application. The channels that promote reality programs and trash TV shows are at the last positions, the research has shown.

“I am not surprised at all that film, documentary and even sports channels are present that much, and then RTS and other televisions. The fact that RTS is watched the most is not surprising, that is the case among the whole population. It is, on the positive side, surprising a bit that young people usually do not watch channels with reality programs and similar formats. But, on the other hand, they usually do not watch TV at all, it is not there to inform them, so everything has positive and negative elements”, Stojanović explains.

The question is, of course, what young people critically think about what is served via TV channels, but it is clear that the story which now must be told by a combination of genres and technologies to be interesting and attractive still more important than publically significant information. Today, that is called multimedia, a discipline which highlights the internet and pushes the traditional media back.

The opinions of young people on significant social matters can be read in NYCS PUBLICATION.