One apple a day keeps the doctor away, says the well-known proverb. And what parent hasn’t repeated it, day in and day out to his kids, in the hope that they would get the point. “Drill, baby, drill,” to quote ever-entertaining Gov Palin. Well, Amber (COMM 599 Amber) will probably agree that what holds true for apples may also hold true for newspapers. Train kids to read the paper early, they might well keep the habit once grown up. At least that France’s strategy.
As someone mentioned last week (not sure whether I should quote David or Michael Schudson on this), French President Sarkozy recently presented a series of measures he wants to pass in order to support a fledgling industry. While most measures are fiscal aids, one sticks out for it is reminiscent of the apples proverb: each kid, during the year where she’s 18, should get a free subscription to a daily paper. The hope, of course, is that said kid would get hooked and then get her own subscription upon turning 19.
While most discussions about the future of papers in the digital age revolve around developing viable online business models for news, this measure revolves around sustaining the print paper itself – which is a pretty good idea given new technologies such as radio, the phonograph, and TV, only seem to create a shift in the economic models of the previous industries instead of plain destroying them.
Back to the measure: it would be financed half by the paper picked by the 18-year old, and half by the government. This technique actually isn’t new in France. When I was in high school, we were able to get heavily discounted subscriptions to magazines, courtesy of the magazine industry and of the gov.
Another thing I remember: when I was in college in Paris, daily Le Figaro (which was still then an outstanding paper) would drop piles of its financial edition at the school, so students could get their free copy and get hooked. I did in fact get hooked. Is this something that would be feasible in the US? How about the LA Times starts dumping a bunch of free copies for Trojans and baby bruins to read? I have no idea what the cost of this would be, or what the return would be. But this is something worth looking into it.
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Would many 18-year-olds in the U.S. actually read even a free newspaper?
ReplyDeleteWell, US kids are no dumber than French kids, are they? I guess you may wonder how many 18-year old in France actually read a free newspaper. Maybe they will all pick the sports daily, l'Equipe. But reading everyday (even just the sports pages) is better than not reading.
ReplyDeleteI guess the idea is that more kids will read the paper if delivered to their door for free than if they need to buy it or go to the public library. What would be interesting is to look at entry/exit statistics to see if the program is effective. I'll look up the organization that handled the free magazines program when I was a kid to see if they have any data available...