Expanding Media Arena, Communication Skills and Youth Participation in Newspaper Discourse
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Date
2016
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Publisher
Journal of Media and Communication Studies
Abstract
In Nigeria, newspaper arena for youth participation has been expanding in the past ten years, especially
with the advent of the Internet. But researchers of youth communication seem to be drawn away from
traditional media to Internet-enabled media thereby paying inadequate attention to this phenomenon.
And it appears that, due to this inadequate attention, a clear case of increasing inclusiveness in
Nigeria’s newspaper industry is scarcely mentioned in literature. This study is, therefore, designed to
investigate the claims of expanding newspaper arena and extent of youth contribution to newspaper
discourse on the one hand, and the relationship between the extent of their contribution and specified
youth characteristics, media agenda-behaviour and topic of discourse on the other. To investigate
expanding arena, the study employed content analysis; for youth participation, a survey design, which
was triangulated with interview, was adopted. The findings indicate that there is a clear case of
expansion of arena because each of the selected newspapers did not only set agenda for youth
participation but also dedicated ample space weekly to youth discourse. Interviewed editors of the
pages indicated that youths contributed more content than their newspapers needed each week but
scored them low on quality of contents contributed (generally average and below average). The
statistical measurement of relationship also indicated that there is a moderately significant relationship
between extent of youth content creation and perceived adequacy of communication skill. But the
relationships found between the extent of content creation and media agenda-behaviour and topic of
discourse were insignificant. It was, therefore, recommended that attention should be paid to youth
communication capacity building and media literacy to enhance their capacity to contribute to media
discourse and national development
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Keywords
Media- agenda, Youth -participation, Youth-characteristics, Agenda-behaviour, Nigeria, Newspaper