Here's Red in Your Eye

By: Mark Fitzgerald Talking newspapers with John K. Hartman is always a treat. He manages the rare intellectual feat of being outspoken and plain spoken at the same time.

So when he was in Chicago last week, I gladly got together with him for breakfast. It was great conversation, though I came away most surprised by the things I heard myself saying.

Hartman is the journalism professor from Central Michigan University who for a long time was just about the only booster that USA Today had in the Groves of Academe. In the early days when his colleagues were mocking "McPaper," Hartman told anybody who would listen that Al Neuharth's folly would fly.

He turned out to be mostly right--even though the Nation's Newspaper did not single-handedly solve the industry's youth-readership puzzle, as it sometimes seemed Hartman thought it might.

Hartman was in Chicago conducting field research on a couple of other closely watched youth initiatives, the Chicago Tribune's carefully researched and focus-grouped RedEye, and Red Streak, the similarly named daily the Chicago Sun-Times publishes as a kind of guerrilla campaign to thwart its rival's tabloid ambitions.

He'll lay out his conclusions about the youth dailies in a formal paper later this year, but the more we talked about the "Reds," the more I came to my own conclusion: I think RedEye is getting better all the time.

When RedEye launched in October of 2002, I was one of many media critics who were pretty dismissive. There was too much content barely repurposed from the Tribune Mother Ship. The columnists had, like, nothing to say, dude. Even the graphics stunk, inexcusable in a paper that calls itself an edition of the Chicago Tribune.

Though RedEye was the first big youth initiative, it seemed to me that the others that followed--especially the Dallas Morning News' Quick and the Quad- City Times' Your Mom in Davenport, Iowa--were more on the right track.

Of course, as a home-owning, lawn-mowing Baby Boomer living in a cop-and-fireman Chicago neighborhood that's nobody's idea of hip, I was well outside RedEye's target demographic.

But nearly three years later, and approaching a solid two decades older than the outer reach of RedEye's 18 to 34 cohort, I increasingly find myself an admirer of what the paper is doing. I buy it once or twice a week, putting me in the minority with the 15,000 or so people who actually pay for their copies of RedEye, which distributes about 80,000 on an average weekday.

In contrast to the dark, inky covers of its first days, RedEye front pages really pop now with bold and well-chosen images. The headlines are nearly unfailingly clever, LOL as the kids say in their Xangas.

Those cover stories pretty consistently strike the correct tone depending on the subject. In a typical week, it seems to me, three covers are devoted to some entertainment figure.

From the start, RedEye's sports section was pretty good. It's only gotten better. I can see how it would appeal to the young male fan weaned on cable shows like "Around the Horn" or sports talk radio. The main story, always broken into graphic-heavy bite-sized bits, revolves around a theme rather than a game result.

In the daily "Five On Five" feature, staff sportswriters offer smart-alecky answers like "Did I pick up my dry cleaning?" to questions such as "What goes through your mind when you see (former Chicago Cub Sammy) Sosa has homered?" The questions are also addressed by a dog called Whizzer and a figure representing long-suffering Chicago fans called Bag Boy. On Fridays, a reader joins the group. When RedEye offered to open a space to reader pets, it was inundated with applicants, according to RedEye Co-Editor Jane Hirt.

A recurring feature of fist puppets--think Senor Wences from the Ed Sullivan days--with Cubs and White Sox helmets taunt each other depending on their relative fortunes in the previous day's games.

RedEye has even stripped the boring parts out of baseball box scores, offering what it calls a "Low Carb Box Score."

But RedEye also appreciates agate. Its "Rape Report" and other police blotter items was noted in the July print issue of E&P. But the agate extends to far cheerier topics, such as the daily drink specials at popular bars. For 20-somethings, the information that Smithwick's drafts and Jameson shots are $3 at Slainte on Sundays is news you can use.

RedEye increasingly makes good use in print of its entertainment-oriented metromix.com site.

RedEye is also doing a better job of treating advertising as content. It's not only getting some ads that will never darken the pages of the Tribune, but many of those ads are useful and well-designed, like welcome pop-ups, if such a thing exists. Just this Friday, for instance, Mini Cooper advertised its sporty car with an ad that ran along the top of the page and continued down a full column. Mostly blank space, it showed a car coming around the corner of the page. "Nothing corners like a Mini," the ad said.

The paper still has its problems. Its columnists are an acquired taste I've yet to develop. Straight news stories tend to be dumped directly from the Tribune, shortened but not edited. The gossip pages are pretty indistinguishable from the stuff that syndicates sell to every little small-town daily. (In contrast, Red Streak's "Scurrilous" feature is a nasty guilty pleasure that the Sun-Times has moved into its main product.)

I still don't know why RedEye doesn't run comics, but it did pick up the "Sudoku" number puzzle. I know from my own teenager's intense interest in the feature that that is a good readership move.

J-school professor Hartman understandably won't comment on his research until it's published, but he says he thinks RedEye, and even the after-thought Red Streak, may be finding a market.

I think he might be right again.