24, Czech Republic

Tereza holds a BA degree in Journalism and in Political Science and is writing her Master thesis in Political science. Since 2008, she has been working for MF DNES as a reporter for the paper and also as a web editor for the online version. She writes mainly about politics and is especially interested in the communist past of her home country.

How to encourage young people to read? This is the million dollar question for editors of any serious paper or a weekly magazine. The problem nowadays is even broader. It is not just young readers who don’t seem to be interested in reading about the war in Libya, political crises in Middle East or the domestic reform of pensions. It has become incredibly difficult to appeal to readers of all generations.

Many people in the Czech Republic don’t vote. Among non-voters, the majority are  young people. They don’t vote because they don’t care. They don’t have enough information and they aren’t interested either. They are disgusted by what they see on TV and what they heard on the radio. In their defence, the show the Czech politicians are performing is sometimes really disgusting. However, in my opinion, it’s not a solution to pretend politics doesn’t exist.

Even if young people were interested in politics, it would be hard for them to get a source of information. The first option is their family. If your parents are not interested in politics it is quite likely that you won’t be. The schools don’t help either in this case, because the information about politics that students are given in high School is very limited. The Roman Empire and Egyptian pyramids have always been focussed on more in history lessons, in comparison to the collapse of USSR. Information about the Czech electoral system is not provided at all. As a result, when people receive the ballot, they simply do not know what to do with it. I also recall my grandmother once saying: “I couldn’t go to vote. I opened the envelope and the thing was as big as my tablecloth. I didn’t know what to do with it.”

Sometimes even the media make it quite hard for people to understand politics. Although I have to admit TV provides news in an simpler way than printed newspapers, the TV news are also usually too superficial. For instance, the most viewed program in the Czech Republic are the evening news “Televizní Noviny” on the commercial channel TV NOVA. Unfortunately the thing people care most about is the blond anchorwoman whose personal life has been filling pages of tabloids ever since the beginning of her career.

On the other hand, printed papers can describe topics more in depth and readers don’t have to care about the look of the journalist. Unfortunately, buying a paper requires additional money, more time and patience. And how would you make a teenager buy newspapers instead of an ice cream? Therefore I think that this problem is viewed mainly from the financial side, both by readers and news makers.

You could say that the solution is to go online, but the information on the internet can be superficial as well. There are several studies about how long an article on a website should be before the reader gets bored. Moreover, there are also financial restraints for news agencies because reading news online is usually free and the income generated from advertising revenue can’t cover the costs of producing news. As a result, the quality of online news is often not very high.

Moreover, you can’t expect that a 17 year-old girl is interested in the same topic as a 45 year-old man. But what is the topic interesting for young people? I remember attending a journalistic workshop with Erik Tabery, the chief editor of one of the Czech weeklies Respekt. He described how they managed to increase their circulation, but they were still unsuccessful in approaching young readers. So he asked us: “What kind of story could appear in our magazine to attract young people?” We were discussing it for more than two hours but we didn’t really find a solution. Maybe it would be better to ask the target audience directly than trying to figure it out in the group of twenty young journalist students, all of them highly interested in politics. Sometimes even easy ideas may work.

Tereza_Reznakova