The 'Unreachable' Generation | Millennials' complex relationship with News Media

This was originally intended as a newsletter, and as I sat to write, it became much more. Clearly I had something to get off my chest.

I purposely left this newsletter to go out today, because as of this moment, I’m likely deep into an ‘ommmm’ while on a beach.?

Building a new company is not easy and I’ve learned that I require deep rest and deep reflection time to fill my cup.?

So please do not judge, but I left my husband, kids and team at home and flew away for a week to sink into the vision of what I’m building and why it’s important.?

I am currently? ‘unreachable’.?

Which is what we really need to talk about… this idea of being unreachable.?

Because it’s not just the start-up founders and vacationers who digitally detox who are unreachable…?

Research is now proving that it’s a massive, major, giant portion of Millennials and GenZers.?

And it’s having a huge impact on marketing strategies and certainly on earned and paid media strategies (and yes, podcasting fits in here too).

So today, let’s unpack the ‘unreachable’ trend, why it’s happening, who it’s happening to and what this means for the future of media.?

The great cable ditch started in the ‘ought’ era and became de rigeur around the time of the financial crisis in 2008.

The fact that I was a cord cutter was one of the multiple reasons I left mainstream media when I did.?

I mean - I was on television every single day and didn’t have a cable television subscription.?

Cord cutting is the act of not paying for traditional cable services - like network news, specialty channels and so forth.?

It’s simple to say the rise of cord cutting among 20 and 30-somethings was purely a reaction to financial realities - rising housing costs, underemployment, rampant inflation, massive piles of debt (need I go on?)

On the surface, it looks like a purely financial decision. Cord cutting can save hundreds per month.

But below the surface was a fundamental and generational dissociation with mainstream media, and mainstream ‘news’ in particular.?

Sometime at the early turn of the century, Millennials stopped liking the news, and then they stopped valuing the news, and many started actively avoiding the news.

I remember when this first hit me - as a young broadcaster who’d just jumped from the fast-paced, take no prisoners world of talk radio, into the fast-paced, ‘looks always matter’ world of broadcast television in 2012.?

And the majority of my peers didn’t even know how to find my channel.?

“Great news ET!” they chimed. “How do I see you? I don’t watch the news.”?

“Way to go rockstar! Wish I had cable so I could see you! Is it on Facebook too?”?

I had more octogenarian fans than I did fans in my own friend groups.?

With the exception of a handful of colleagues from journalism school, by 2012 most people I knew either had or were considering completely ditching cable…?

Not only that, but they also took time out of their day to tell me ‘they didn’t watch the news’.

There is a connection between going cable-free and ‘not watching the news’.

It might not be obvious right away, but as this trend continues - it’s hard to ignore.?

Cable cutting and ‘not watching the news’ are linked…

Because what we understand today as ‘cable content’ was founded on the principles established in the business of news media. Cable is cable because in the 80s, we commoditized the news.?

Ted Turner and his brilliant concept of an ‘always there when you need it’ news channel in 1982 morphed into what we know today as CNN and the ubiquitous 24-hour news cycle.?

That model birthed a generation of other news channels - CTV News Channel, CP24, CBC and countless others globally.?

News media pioneers in the 80s and early 90s masterfully blended our need for information with a medium of delivery that matched cultural expectations.?

How did it work??

It served a need for information.?

It created a culture.?

It built authority.?

It was infinitely ‘watchable’ (watchable being the precursor to today’s more familiar term ‘bingeable’.)

But fundamentally… because it was a money making machine.?

Advertisers loved it.?

Audiences loved it.?

And people got rich from it.

In the 80s and 90s, the news was part of what we did and how we lived and who we were.?

Not to put too fine a point on this, but there’s a reason old folks still call it the ‘Dinner Hour News’ - because in the 80s, families would eat dinner together and watch the news every night (and then Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune).

I’ll eat my hat if you can think of anything more ‘fancy’ than being on the news to someone who was an adult in the 80s.?

Grammas the world round saying “It even made the news!”

We Millennials were born into the ‘always on’ and ‘always news’ world.

Our ‘always on’ brains were birthed right alongside the ‘new’ news business.?

This Millennial just happened to drink the KoolAid and learned to love the business.

So about 20 years later, when an entire generation decided they didn’t want to partake in cable anymore, they were also signalling that they didn’t want to participate in a culture of media that no longer resonated with them - namely ‘the news’.

It’s no coincidence that cord cutting showed up about two decades after we commoditized the news because that’s precisely when Milliennials were not only coming of age… but were able to make their own life and financial choices.?

We’d left the nest.?

Flown the coop.?

“Watching the news” suddenly became ‘for old people’.

We no longer aligned with being a commodity or participating in the commoditization of information that we didn’t value, and an industry that didn’t reflect our reality.

Over the course of about a decade in the early 2000s, you could literally watch the ratings for 6pm newscasts and morning shows plummet.?

And then of course, as Millennial audiences continued to peel away from the great media machine of old, that machine started to lose steam - aka market share and revenue.?

Because that once easily ‘reachable’ audience of 25-34 year olds, slowly became unreachable. They weren’t watching at the dinner table anymore.?

They weren’t watching at all.

And a media machine is only as valuable as the audience it serves.

In the months and years that followed, media sales departments quietly developed a mantra of ‘the rate card is just a starting point for a negotiation’.?

Five-figure ad buys in local markets shrunk to four-figure buys, then three-figure sales and then to a painful slow zero-sum game.?

It’s gotten so bad, last month Post Media laid off their entire sales team in certain Canadian markets.?

I don’t know what we’re supposed to glean from this other than that mainstream media itself - television, radio and print - believes it has become un-sellable.

What you’ll hear in sales rooms and agency boardrooms over and over again is ‘how do we get advertisers to keep spending with us? What more can we do to keep them and their spend?”

With these questions, a new sub-trend has developed… one that, I feel deeply, has caused near irreparable damage to the media landscape.?

Media buys have become about expected added value.?

We’ve lost sight of the inherent value of a healthy news media and an engaged audience - period.

In other words, the entire conversation about the value of mainstream media is now irreversibly imbalanced; with the networks fully knowing they’ve lost significant audience share and advertisers fully knowing they can squeeze them for whatever they want.?

I’ve heard stories of station execs giving brands and agencies freebies in anticipation of a buy (that then never materialised - why pay for the cow, when you can get the milk for free?).?

The question remains ‘how does one add value to something that isn’t valuable to begin with?”

In the last few months, I’ve heard stories from the trenches, from off the record sources, telling me that local radio buys now include Facebook and Instagram campaigns - and that the spots on the radio are positioned as added value to the social media placements.

*I’ll take a minute so we can both let our heads stop spinning*

We’ve jumped the shark.?

We’ve wagged the dog.?

We’ve put the horse, ox and huskies before the wagon, cart, sled… and then hollered ‘Mush!’

The old school is so stuck being old that it won’t, hasn’t, and dare I say, is unwilling to adapt.

And the unintended consequence is that audiences and media keep being sold for bottom dollar.?

And then the media companies’ profits tank.?

And then they fire journalists and obliterate newsrooms.?

And then people don’t watch or listen to the news because there’s nothing worth watching or listening to.?

And then the vicious (and entirely avoidable) cycle continues..?

And as someone who has dedicated her entire life to the media, its merits, its opportunities, possibilities and people… it’s all just a little defeating.

It feels a lot like watching Leonardo diCaprio freezing in the waters of the North Atlantic while screaming at the screen ‘there’s room on that door for two fucking people you idiot!’

Because there is a way to reach the unreachables… they haven’t disappeared. They just aren’t where they used to be.

It’s like the Newtonian Law of Audiences (I just made that up, but thanks Isaac) - the audience never disappears. It never evaporates.?

It moves somewhere else.?

And smart media executives know how to find the audience when it moves.?

And here’s the thing.?

It’s not that I think modern media executives aren’t asking the question ‘where did the audience go?’ - it’s that I don’t think the old guard likes the answer.

As folks ditched cable across North America, we all witnessed the rise of YouTubers, social media influencers, and (you knew this was coming) podcasts.?

And it took mainstream way too long to not just believe this was happening, but allow it to happen.?

Media isn’t one thing.?

Media is, and always will be, defined by the audience.?

If the audience isn’t watching cable, is actively moving away from traditional supper hour broadcasts, couldn’t tune an AM radio if their life depended on it - then it’s up to the leaders of media to listen and move with the audience.?

And that just hasn’t happened.?

Big Canadian corporations that shall remain nameless, but easily figureoutable, were all bark and no bite back in 2014 with their ‘digital first’ mandate.?

Which at the time meant hiring an intern to rewrite news scripts, source generic stock photos and add a by-line to a somewhat geo-located website and call it ‘digital media’.?

There was nothing new there.?

In fact, there was no reason for an audience member to go there, let alone stay and click around and have - gasp! - a meaningful experience or interaction with the content.

The digital first mandate was tantamount to ‘well shit, I guess we need to put the news online…”?

And guess what? The research proves it didn’t work. A Harvard Study on Canadian news consumption and ownership ranks those Canadian news networks that ‘tried to give the audience a digital experience’ as last in the pecking order of preference among those who still do consume news.?

Let’s not even get into the backlash from major media corporations to large tech companies ‘giving away news for free’.?

That gripe is simply indicative of an industry that isn’t willing to adapt, innovate or problem solve. It’s not a good look, boys. You can do better.

So how do we reach the unreachable??

What needs to happen to reconnect and redefine the media landscape so that it’s not stuck in the past, so that it serves audiences, and so that - dare I say - media becomes a profitable business again??

We need innovative thinkers and doers on both sides of the media equation - the content side and the sales side.?

It’s no longer enough to buy attention in a supper-hour day part or morning show rotation.?

And it’s not enough to have a great idea, a great concept for an ad, show or series and toss it out to the world, hoping it finds traction.?

We are in a new world where content needs to fuel sales and development and advertising can and must inspire great storytelling.?

We need to bridge the gap.?

The newsrooms of the future will be more integrated with the business as a whole.?

Integrity and trust will be earned, the same way it always was, by sharing more with the audiences, inviting them into the process more completely… and listening to what they want…?

News and programming can no longer be served on a ‘you get what you get and you don’t get upset’ platter.?

To cut through, to reach the unreachable, media needs to get out of its own damn way.?

Acknowledge it’s a two way street.?

And recapture the imaginations of a generation that has loudly, and clearly, told us the old ways are gone.?

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Hello btw. I'm Erin Trafford.

I'm an award winning broadcaster, and I love the media business. I am currently the founder and CEO at Story Studio Network. Ask me about podcasts. Ask me about the future of news. Subscribe to my actual newsletter at www.storystudionetwork.com/newsletter