Tony Rogers / About.com Guide

Read up on the sturm und drang in the news business and you’ll find plenty of pundits predicting the death of print journalism in the next five minutes or so, along with a few (like myself) who think newspapers have still have some life left in them. Whichever side you’re on, the debate seems to mostly focus on delivery systems and business models — print vs. digital, display ads vs. pay-per-click, and so on.

But all the geek-speak loses sight of a more fundamental problem: With each passing year, young people grow less interested in the news, regardless of how it’s delivered.

Statistics bear this out. Both newspaper circulation and network newscast ratings have long been in decline, and the audience that remains grows ever older. (Even morning news shows, once thought immune to such trends, are now losing viewers.) A Harvard survey found that only one in 20 teens and one in 12 young adults read a newspaper on close to a daily basis.

Online news fares little better. A recent study found that in 2008, roughly 64 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds said they had viewed a newspaper online within the last year. But by 2009 that had dropped to 54 percent. The figures are even more worrisome when you consider that the study just measured whether a respondent had read online news at all — even once — in the last year.

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