The Media Management Center at Northwestern recently completed a study about how teens consume news (the results will come out this fall at mediamanagementcenter.org). Lots of interesting stuff in there, but there was one specific finding that really spoke to me: One of the findings was that a lot of the teens cited their favorite places for news as Comcast. (Yes, Comcast -- as in the telephone/cable company).

Comcast, when it goes into your home to set up an Internet connection, sets your Internet Explorer homepage to default to Comcast.com. You have to hand it to the company: It’s smart. This move has really worked for them, primarily because people are too lazy (or don’t know how!) to change their default start page settings. So, every time someone opens their Web browser to go to MySpace or Facebook or anywhere else, Comcast gets a page view. And, if something on that Comcast home page happens to “catch their eye” – a phrase that came up among the teens repeatedly – the teens said they would click on it. Bam! There’s a page view for the site that provided that headline.

The teens in the Media Management Center study who said they go to Comcast for news just underscored the importance of getting newspaper content in front of people wherever those people are. If teens and young adults aren’t going to your newspaper’s Web site to get news, you’re going to have to go to them.

How? A few ideas: Media companies could partner with Comcast or other local cable services to drive traffic. They could partner with popular Web sites with area teens, such as high schools that have their own portal Web sites. Ask school librarians to set the default page on all school computers to the newspaper’s site. Content publishing companies should create widgets and headline feeds that easily interface with other sites like MySpace and Facebook.

Based on this, the Media Management Center is recommending taking that “catches my eye” phrase and using it s a central point in a teen/young reader growth strategy. This doesn’t mean putting humorous kitten user-generated video content on the top of your news site, but it means putting sports, entertainment and features stories out there for teens to stumble across.

Some other findings to highlight:

• The serendipity aspect of news online is becoming increasingly important (see above).
• Favorite news sites, according to teens, have these characteristics: They are easy to use, give them information they can trust, and give them something to talk about with friends, family.
• Some teens made this connection: The more people use a site, the more financially successful it must be, therefore the bigger the brand, and big brands are generally credible because they have so much to lose if they don’t act credibly. (In other words: Big = Trustworthy.)

In addition, I wanted to point you to a few teen media research resources if you’re interested in reading more about this:

GrowingAudience.com – This site, from NAA, has a research on teens, newspapers and other media habits.

YPulse.com – Anastatia Goodstein, who wrote “Totally Wired,” keeps this blog and has a conference coming up in New York later this month called the YPulse Mash-Up.

Kaiser Family Foundation: This study, called “The Teen Media Juggling Act,” was released in late 2006.