Why won't the younger generation read newspapers? It's a moan of our times, and television, the internet, schools and a dumbing down of culture, media and life are held to blame. Feeling threatened in a lifetime's profession, I went along to a school to ask - why won't you buy my product?

The school was an international one, mainly for Americans: security reasons - evident in the presence of young, hard-looking men patrolling the cold streets about it - forbid the naming and placing of it. Its students are the sons and daughters, in the main, of middle- and upper-middle class professionals - diplomats, bankers, multinational executives. They have newspapers at home - often the Financial Times. But when Alice Leader, a novelist who teaches history, talked to her class of 13 and 14-year-olds last year about current affairs, she discovered that none read the news, nor knew anything about newspapers. "A few of them didn't know where you bought newspapers."