Do Papers Aimed At Youth Have a Future?

By: Several daily newspapers are planning to target youth with new publications aimed at 18-to-34-year-olds, but will they succeed? We offer pro and con views. First, E&P's unsigned editorial from this week's issue suggests why "da chainz" just might succeed. Then, E&P intern Chris Nammour argues that you can't teach a young dog old tricks.

Word From Da Chainz

E&P's View

Young adults are this season's hottest fashion in the newspaper industry.

That's quite a change for newspapers. When baby boomers were all the rage, papers pretty much sat on their hands, patiently waiting for them to grow up a little. Wait till they get married and mortgaged, the industry said -- then that huge demographic cohort would start subscribing in the same massive numbers that made Earth shoes and VW bugs so popular. By the 1980s, when boomers were in Nikes and Nissans, it gradually dawned on newspapers that they had missed the market.

The big chains are determined that won't happen with this g-g-generation, so they are getting hip in a hurry. Phat cats such as Douglas H. McCorkindale at Gannett Co. Inc. and John W. Madigan at the Tribune Co. are green-lighting new papers aimed at 18-to-34-year-olds -- and all their bitchin' disposable income.

Gannett figures Noise will bring in da funk every week in Lansing, Mich. In November, the Chicago Tribune does it daily with a tabloid named -- wink, wink -- RedEye. The Canadians from Hollinger International Inc. who run the Chicago Sun-Times reportedly are trying to beat the Tribune to the street with their own, as-yet-unnamed, paper. Let's hope for a confrontational name that rekindles the Chicago newspaper war, Biggie/Tupac-style. Something like, Step The F*** Off, Eh?

To all y'all publisherz, we gotta give out mad props.

Seriously. Because it's about time U.S. newspapers tried a strategy that has already been proven in Puerto Rico, Panama, Colombia, and Brazil. The Latin American experience shows that stand-alone youth-oriented dailies reach kids without cannibalizing the circulation of their parent papers. The Readership Institute's "Impact" study provides massive and convincing evidence that properly done youth papers can work here, too.

But while publishers may covet youth dollars, they aren't doing much to earn youth respect. Consider how papers treat their youngest journalists and newsroom applicants. This summer, the University of Georgia's annual employment and salary survey of new journalism-school graduates demonstrated again how newspapers make their jobs so unappealing to beginners.

Papers slashed their starting salaries by about $1,000 to a median of $26,000 -- nearly $5,000 less than even English-literature graduates are getting. At 21.4%, the unemployment rate for j-school grads was 2% higher than their peers aged 21 to 24 -- and rising.

True, these are tough times, and poor pay a newspaper tradition. What's different is that papers are ever more grudging and penurious with compensation -- and kids now are smart enough to tire of it sooner than previous generations. Six months out of school, only 28% of new journalists say they are "very satisfied" with their jobs.

Newspapers that do not welcome young journalists cannot expect to win young readers, no matter how dope they think their new papers are. Peace out.

News On Dead Trees Is Dead Idea

Op-Ed Column

by Chris Nammour

When I return to Northwestern University in January, I will not be reading RedEye, the Chicago Tribune's heralded new "youth" paper due to be introduced next month. I may glance at it once in a while, raid it for coupons, perhaps peruse one or two issues in my lifetime. But as far as I'm concerned, the Tribune is wasting a whole lot of time and money on the likes of me.

Who am I? I'm one of those young people who advertisers (and therefore the Trib) desperately want to reach. A senior at a nearby college, from a middle-class household, I fall nicely into RedEye's 18-to-34-year-old demographic and, theoretically, have money to burn.

If this new weekday paper isn't being created for me, I don't know who it's for. Unfortunately, I don't read newspapers. At least not regularly. And I'm far from alone.

Publishers can't seem to attract younger readers to their traditional dailies, so they're now considering targeting them with hip alt-weekly wannabes. But what the Chicago Tribune, and the flock of papers that will blindly follow suit, doesn't understand is that the very idea of picking up a newspaper is foreign to my generation.

Some argue this is because today's youth just don't care about what goes on in the world and that we're ignorant of national affairs, but that's far from the truth. While stereotypical clueless college students do exist, they are exceptions. With the threat of war looming and the economy in the gutter, America's young people are very aware of what is going on. But they're not following it via newspapers.

My car's radio dial is set permanently on National Public Radio. I watch more CNN than MTV, VH1, and Fox combined. And the first thing I do after checking my e-mail is go directly to not one but several news sites -- some of them offshoots of the newspapers I'm not reading (such as The New York Times and The Washington Post). I'll even grab a copy of Time when something really piques my interest.

If anything, I'm a news junkie, not some slacker who lives in a bubble. But I readily admit I can't recall the last time I picked up an actual newspaper. I hate newspapers. The feel of the paper, the ink stains, the eye-straining print, the obtrusive advertisements -- why deal with that when I can get the reporting and shopping advice and listings I need off a Web site?

Following the birth of the Web, there was a flood of concern that "it was the death of the newspaper as we know it." Then came the collective sigh of relief when, a few years later, it became obvious that the people who had been buying papers were still buying papers.

Newsflash: Those people who were buying your papers, and kept buying your papers, are going to get old one day, if they're not old already. Their kids grew up with the fastest and most far-reaching communication tool in history at the tip of their fingers. Do you think we're going to bother with an early-morning trudge to retrieve a soggy mass of pulp when we can download the latest news with the click of a button?

And RedEye misses the boat with its "tailored content." The war for readers isn't about content -- it's about convenience. The content is already out there, ad infinitum, online and in print, for the people who want to read it. They don't need a dumbed-down weekday version of what's going on in the world, written in slang and surrounded by generic movie reviews and lame interviews with rock musicians. Getting content to us in the most efficient way is the important thing, and for someone who grew up with a remote control in one hand and a mouse in the other, the efficient way is not a newspaper.

Whether through customizing sites to readers, issuing news alerts via e-mail, or tying their sites to something else entirely, the Web can be the best way, maybe the only way, for newspapers to get in touch with young readers. While RedEye may be largely ignored by its target audience, its sibling Metromix (http://www.metromix.com), will not be. Instead of copying RedEye, other papers should see the light at the end of the tunnel -- and invest their dollars in Web pages, not pulp pages.

Newspaper execs often say that today's young Web junkies, as they grow older, will eventually read papers "like their parents did." Don't count on it. Maybe my career won't entail hours in front of a computer every day, or I'll spend a lot of time traveling, or I'll discover some hidden benefit a bulky newspaper has over reading a free Web site with the same content. But most likely I'll still be using the Net to shop, check movie listings -- and read the news.

You can't teach a young dog old tricks.

Nammour, a senior at the Medill School of Journalism, is an intern at E&P.

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To comment on this issue, please e-mail gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com.