News Networks Try to Get Hip to the Youth Vote. Can We Help Them?

Following up further on establishing a better communications apparatus for youth organizers, I wanted to point everyone to this article in the New York Times:

Television Starts to Court Young Voters:

With polls showing a surge in primary-season ballots cast by voters under 30, media outlets are out to convert the newly energized voters into viewers. On cable news, CNN promotes a “League of First Time Voters” and the Fox News Channel is covering what it calls the Y Factor with a full-time correspondent. On broadcast, NBC has assigned Luke Russert, the son of the late anchor Tim Russert, to the youth vote beat and ABC, CBS and PBS are all running stories by student journalists.

It's not just about trying to revive their business model by drawing in more, and younger, eyeballs. The networks genuinely seem to get that they are missing out on the youth vote story:

Heather Nauert, a Fox News Channel correspondent, started covering the youth vote in February, one month after exit polls started showing significant spikes in turnout rates. “We basically said, ‘Oh my gosh, this is a big story and we’ve got to cover it,’ ” she said. On Fox, Ms. Nauert’s reports have appeared on the network’s nightly news program “The Fox Report” and were compiled for an hourlong special report, “The Y Factor,” last month.
...
About 6.5 million people under 30 participated in the primaries and caucuses this year, almost double the number that turned out in 2000. Mr. Todd said that he believed the surge in youth interest had not been sufficiently captured by media organizations.

“It’s because of something I call the ‘been there, done that’ disease,” he said. “We hear about the young vote all the time, and at the end of the day, does it show up?” It did in 2004, he said, answering his own question, “but everybody showed up in 2004.”

Since then, the demographics have shifted. “We are seeing a partisan divide between young and old like we haven’t seen before,” Mr. Todd said. “This is a big part of this election.”

In response, the major cable and network news channels are all staffing up to cover the youth vote this cycle. This presents us with an opportunity that we didn't have in 2004. In '04, everyone was a skeptic and few outlets wanted to do more than cover major celebrity efforts like Vote or Die when writing their token youth vote article.

This year, we may actually have a corps of reporters who are open to learning about what's really going on in youth organizing when you look behind Christina Aguilera, TI or other celebrity spokespersons. Young viewers - more in tune with getting their news online - may not watch the segments produced by this new campaign corps, but other journalists - editors, reporters, print, online, TV - do watch their coverage. While I would never advocate for a solely top-down communications strategy, these jouralists represent a good chance to "influence the influencers," and make sure that the correct story about youth participation is getting told.

Here's how the article lays them out:

Fox News - Heather Nauert
CNN - League of First Time Voters; lead reporter: ???????
MSNBC - Luke Russert
NBC News - Luke Russert
ABC News - Student Journalists. Schools TBD?
CBS News - ???????

Hopefully these people or representatives of these projects will all attend the Youth Press Conference at the DNC so we can put faces, emails, and phone number to names. These reporters need to look past the celebrities and examine the grass roots organizing. They need to understand the value of peer to peer organizing and the proper role of the internet. Above all, they need to understand that increased youth turnout is a trend, not a fluke. We don't want anymore major media stories like this one.