Young people and menu-driven print navigation

Journalists despairing of ever attracting young adults to newspapers and magazines have been theorizing lately that one major problem is navigation. It's assumed that young people can't make sense of the organizing principle of newspapers, since they've supposedly been conditioned to look for the menu on websites.

Is menu-driven navigation truly what young people prefer? Maybe. But right now, it looks a little like a substitute for hard thinking about content. If we really want to effectively serve readers, it might be worth some investigation. It should be a simple matter to study which models of navigation are most appealing to different generations, and gravitate toward the ones that are most useful to younger people. Until that work is done, though, we'll just be speculating.

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