Band 9 IELTS Essay Sample | Few Young People Read Newspapers
Here is a band 9 essay on a topic that appeared in a recently held IELTS test.
In many countries, very few young people read newspapers or follow the news on TV. What do you think are the causes of this? What solutions can you suggest?
Band 9 IELTS Essay Sample
Few young people are interested in reading the newspapers or watching news channels. This is definitely a negative development with long lasting consequences.
Newspapers and news channels give too much importance to politics and economics and youngsters have little interest in these topics. This is the main reason that discourages them from reading or watching news. Consequently, they have little knowledge of national or international affairs. This is a negative development because young people are the present and the future of the nation. If they are unaware of the happenings around them, they will not be able to play an active role in nation building.
Another reason that discourages young people from reading news stories is the information explosion. We are now living in an age where we get bombarded with new bits of information every second. These days news breaks on social media sites like Twitter. When information is available in 140 characters, nobody is interested in reading a 2000 word news story. Unfortunately, there is a downside to this. Social media only provide news; in order to get views we have to read in depth news stories like the ones published in newspapers. Also, it is not always possible to trust information found on the internet. Anyone can post anything online and there is no reliable way to check whether what we have read is true or not.
In order to encourage young people to consume news, newspapers and news channels should make a conscious effort to present news in a way that appeals to young readers. Editors and reporters need to realize that in this fast paced world, no one has the time to read a long, winding story. Making information available in byte sizes will definitely help.
To conclude, young people are turning a blind eye to newspapers and news channels because much of the information available from these sources does not interest them or is not made available in an easy-to-digest format. Media houses need to rethink their preferences and make some drastic changes to their style of reporting to encourage more and more young people to consume news.
