Democratic governance and the health of a community are premised upon informed participation. This includes an understanding of current issues, the means of affecting change, and a gauge of others' views and interests. Three measures have been selected to assess the prominence of discussion and access to information among Chicagoland residents: newspaper reading, consumption of news from multiple media sources, and discussions of political issues with family and friends in person and via the Internet or email.

Frequent and broad access to news and information and engaging in political conversations with others is related to higher civic engagement, and the combination of the two exerts even more powerful effects.

By every measure (see Figure 6), Chicagoland residents outpace their national peers in terms of news attentiveness. The most pronounced gaps lie with those who get their news from the radio and the Internet at least a few times a week. The differences are smaller for newspaper and news magazine readership, and virtually on par in terms of television news watching. When compared with the rest of Illinois, Chicagoland residents are less likely to regularly read newspapers, but more likely to read news magazines and watch television news, and they are more avid consumers of news on the radio and via the Internet.

Millennials in Chicagoland are much less attentive to the news than their older peers. A little more than one–third (35.6%) of 18–29 year–olds read a daily newspaper compared with more than half (52.9%) of those over 30. Similar disparities surface for television (55.4% of Millennials versus 77.2% of those 30 and older) and radio news (33.7% versus 51.9%). However, Millennials are more likely to use the Internet as a daily news source, although a small sample size negates the statistical signicance of this finding.

The ndings of a 2007 report prepared by Thomas Paterson of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, titled Young People and the News , 17 are even more startling. He found that only 9% of teenagers read a newspaper daily, and nearly half (46%) hardly ever or never read the paper. Less than one–third (31%) watch national television news daily, and a quarter of teens listen to radio news daily. Only 20% of teens access the Internet daily for news consumption, and nearly a third (32%) never use the web as a news source.

Once more, news consumption tends to increase over the course of a lifecycle as adult responsibilities, including careers, home ownership, and childrearing, combine to make the embedded information more relevant. However, those Americans currently under 40 exhibit lower levels of news attentiveness at this stage of the life cycle in comparison to previous generations. It is cause for concern and further evidence that two generations of Americans are, in the words of David Mindich, “tuned out.” 18

Thankfully, there is an innovative new model to develop constructive news consumption among middle and high school students across the country by using seasoned journalists to help young people sort fact from ction in the Information Age. The Washington, DC–based News Literacy Project set root in Chicago in 2009, with the aim of teaching “ 19 …students the critical thinking skills they need to be smarter and more frequent consumers and creators of credible information across all media and platforms.”

The consequences of news attentiveness translate into political dialogue among friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens. Such conversations carry their own positive civic consequences. In Chicagoland, those who engage in political discussions report higher rates of volunteerism and are also more likely to make monetary donations to political causes. News attentiveness and political discussions each correlate with xing something in the community with neighbors.

Moreover, political discussions with family members and friends, although fairly widespread, show generational trends. Chicagoland Gen–Xers lead the way on this count, with 80.8% reporting political conversations at least a few times a month. Baby Boomers rank a close second (80.4%), and are actually more likely than Gen–Xers to talk politics a few times a week (47.0% versus 44.5%). The Silent Generation and Millennials are also paired closely together on this front, with the former (72.4%) narrowly surpassing the latter in monthly discussions (70.9%).

Returning to the city–suburb comparison, Chicago residents are more likely to report weekly political conversations with family members and friends (45.9% versus 41.3%), yet monthly political conversations of this nature are more common in the suburbs (36.6% versus 28.2%), where the smallest number report the complete absence of political conversations (22.1% versus 25.9%).