News apps a growing trend among college students

More are getting news from phones and Internet rather than newspapers or TV

Before Bowling Green State University sophomore Max Filby heads to class every morning, he checks the day’s news.

But he doesn’t have to go to a newsstand, or in his case, the front desk of Founders Residence Hall. Filby simply grabs his iPhone and scrolls through the New York Times on an application.

“Every day when I get up I check my iPhone,” Filby said. “I grab it and look up the New York Times app and see what the top headlines are, see if there’s anything interesting to read or tweet about.”

Though the New York Times is usually delivered to the residence halls on campus, Filby said that’s not always the case.

“The New York Times costs a lot of money, and the app is pretty much free,” he said. “I live in Founders and sometimes they don’t always deliver the papers over there.”

A growing trend

Filby is part of a mass trend of people following news on the go.

About 33 percent of people read news stories online, according to people-press.org. When newspapers first began publishing stories on the Internet, they attracted anywhere from 2 to 4 percent of the population.

So, while printed newspaper readership is falling, online news readership is climbing.

But Filby doesn’t think that this will cause the death of newspapers.

“News is always going to be around,” he said. “No matter how people read it, it has to come from somewhere.”

It's the only way some get news

Meg Kettinger, a junior at BGSU, said she hardly ever checked the daily news before she got her droid phone.

“Whenever I go to that screen on my phone, it shows me all things, from news to celebrity, stuff like that,” she said. “I think [apps] are popular because…you don’t have to pick up a newspaper and read the stories, you don’t have to sit in front of your TV and you don’t have to sit in front of your computer because now they’re on your phone. And who’s not on their phone all the time, in this day and age?”

Before Kettinger got the news on her phone, she said she did not really keep up with current events. 

When she would watch TV and the news came on, she would not watch the news. And when she surfed the Internet, she was not looking for news stories.

“When I got my phone it was more helpful to keep up with things because I had an app rather than literally having to change the channel,” Kettinger said.

Future of newspapers not in trouble

Sarah Culmaker, a BGSU alumnus, said she would call herself a “news junkie,” and spends a lot of her time looking up stories on her iPhone.

“It’s mostly celebrity, gossipy stuff like that,” she said. “I still pick up the newspaper, but not as much as I used to. For those national and international stories, I think it’s hard to get those in the local paper.”

Culmaker also said she didn’t think the presence of online news would cause the death of newspapers.

“It’s just a different way to read the same news,” she said.

Selling above the fold

This front page is a fine-designed machine. Except for one thing. Can you spot it?

There is nothing exciting to compel readers to pick up the paper. Maybe the centerpiece is a clean design. Maybe. But the art head falls below the fold, so potential readers won't see it. Do you know what they will do instead? They will continue on to the laundromat, woefully uninformed of the political scandal currently wreaking havoc on Capitol Hill. What gossip will they be able to trade while not mixing their reds with their whites? None. And without a conversation opener, maybe they will never strike one up with the tall, handsome stranger with the dark eyes and chiseled jaw. And maybe then they will never marry and die alone surrounded by empty bottles of wine and cats. Or, even worse, maybe they'll pick up the competition.

So what do I mean by the fold? The fold is that crease in the middle of the newspaper when its folded in half to fit in the newsstand. Designers must always remember to keep the fold in mind when they're designing the front page. (For those who happen to be an inside page designer, the fold still matters, since it's still what readers read first, but it doesn't matter as much because by the time they get to that page, the paper is already open and the fold is almost irrelevant. Lucky SOBs.)

Of course, with the majority of the paper (and eventually all of it) transferring to the Web, this is mostly a moot point. And an excuse to show off the Greensboro News and Record's front page.

Headlines for a Web Audience

In my crony's previous post, she wrote about catchy or punchy art heads (I spell it with the a), and how designers can blow them up big and play with typography in the absence of photos or a better idea.

Soon, though, art heads will be no more.

Since this blog is technically about all the things that will die when newspapers do, I figured I'd spend a moment to talk about Web headlines. Yes, they are different from newspaper headlines.

On a typical front page, for example, The BG News front page on Wednesday, Oct. 13, 2010, the centerpiece is graced with a punny art head: "University rakes in new students." A few, short words get the point across, and the story is further explained by the deck head below.

But this same story might have a revised headline for the Web, something like: "Bowling Green State University rakes in new students for Fall Preview Day." This is a fine headline, but there are now more words, making it less eye-catching and more cumbersome to say.

These headlines get changed for something called search-engine optimization. Newspapers want readers to find their websites, so they plug headlines with as many specific words as possible. When the headline just said "University," not many people would find that story through a search, because there are a lot of universities. But there is only one Bowling Green State University.

Gene Weingarten, a pulitzer-prize winning journalist at The Washington Post, wrote a column about this very phenomenon. His point was that newspaper headlines were losing their original magic when being revised for online readers.

But every once in a while, readers can still stumble across something like this.

Headlines aren't dead yet.