Newspapers Struggle To Hook Young Readers

By: Lucia Moses Youth readership is a burning issue these days for Henry Haitz III, publisher of the Centre Daily Times, and no wonder. In his market of State College, Pa., home to Pennsylvania State University, nearly 40% of the people are between the ages of 18 to 34, almost double the national average.

To serve that audience, Haitz believes it will take something "bold and different" -- not just tweaking his coverage or adding "youth pages," as many are suggesting, but changing the whole format of the newspaper or starting a new publication.

Snaring young readers is especially critical to the Knight Ridder paper's future, but no newspaper publisher can escape the issue. With young people turning away from newspapers as never before, more papers are starting to come to the same realization: that they can no longer rely solely on conventional approaches -- such as expanding their entertainment coverage and listings -- to nurture future readers.

"I think it's almost certainly true that the traditional paper is not going to do the trick," says John Bartolomeo, managing partner of Clark, Martire & Bartolomeo Inc., a research firm in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., that has studied media usage and newspaper-readership habits.

Young people's decreasing appetite for newspapers is a trend going back at least 30 years. The reasons are well-known, among them the multiplication of media choices, the declining role of the newspaper in the home, and the lack of newspaper marketing aimed at young people.

The growth of the Internet and personal digital assistants in the past decade has only exacerbated the trend. While newspapers remain a mass medium, electronic media enable young adapters to individualize their media experience. The Web also has conditioned a generation to the idea of getting news for free -- which will make paid newspapers (even with expanded "youth" material) a harder sell.

There's also the widespread perception of time poverty. Today, Haitz points out, "there are more double-income earners. People have much less time, and we need to do a better job marketing to them."

Reach your children well

In December, Gannett Co. Inc. produced a fat manual full of ideas to make papers more appealing to Generation X after it found that the number of 25-to-34-year-olds who read the paper dropped 20% in the past five years. But with young people less willing to pay for news, Gannett Newspaper Division President Gary L. Watson said recently, "We may have to reach them with an alternative product."

But what? Some ideas outside the traditional newspaper are emerging. Borrowing from similar experiments by papers elsewhere, Gannett plans to launch free weeklies this fall at its community papers in Boise, Idaho, and Lansing, Mich. The Lansing State Journal's working version, tentatively titled Real Life, will attempt to build a sense of community among 20-to-34-year-olds with plenty of short, lifestyle stories that reflect their daily lives, State Journal Executive Editor Michael Hirten says. The paper won't try to compete on local and national news with the State Journal, he says, explaining, "We didn't find in them a huge hunger for hard news."

Such a model may make sense in young-skewing markets without direct competition, but it isn't a sure thing, as State College learned a few years ago from its short-lived experiment with a freebie called Buzz. Haitz says the Daily Times didn't give Buzz enough resources and was distracted by its Web launch. As a result, Buzz never caught on with readers and advertisers.

To make a product authentic, you need a staff of experts, advises Pat Embry, general manager and editor of The Rage, a weekly entertainment guide published by Gannett's The Tennessean in Nashville that uses a lot of 20-something writers to cover the music scene.

Gannett is tossing around other ideas, such as youth-oriented companion Web sites to its existing newspaper sites and customized news delivery via cell phones, in addition to changes to the newspaper itself, says Jennifer Carroll, corporate director of news development. "It's essential for us to tackle new ways to reach them, wherever they want, however they want it," Carroll says.

A number of papers have begun exploiting the Web's endless capacity for customization, adding content to their sites and starting online complements to their teen publications. Sites vary widely in design quality, advertising opportunities, and breadth of content, but standard fare includes student-written news, reviews, and columns, as well as entertainment listings and discussion forums. Many provide outlets for student-produced fiction, poetry, and art.

Getting cross with the kids

And where cross-media ownership and partnerships exist, newspapers are looking to reach kids via broadcast. Four years ago, the Tribune Co.'s Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel launched a Saturday-morning high-school-sports show on the local NBC affiliate, WESH-TV. The show's title carries the newspaper name, and both the newspaper and show cross-promote.

Another Tribune paper, Newsday, based in Melville, N.Y., may be heading in the same direction as it looks for the next wave of products for teen readers. Newsday, after chasing kids and teens with printed products for 30 years, has decided that print alone is no longer enough. "What's changed is, we now have different platforms to reach these kids," explains Howard Schneider, a managing editor and vice president for content development. Those include its own online edition, a local radio station for which Newsday produces a news program, and WB station WPIX-TV, also a Tribune property.

Cost has changed things, too: The price of newsprint makes a paper think twice about adding a few more pages to target only a slice of its audience. That's why when Newsday decided to launch a product for high-schoolers two years ago, it developed a stand-alone sports publication for distribution in schools only. Schneider sees Newsday creating a hybrid of print with broadcast or Web. As for the main paper, he's wary of changing it too drastically: "I'm not for driving older readers out of the paper."

Kids say the darndest things

Still, most papers recognize they can't expect youths to one day become loyal subscribers unless they broaden the appeal of the core product. Most efforts have generally consisted of kids' sections or youth-related stories sprinkled throughout the paper.

Each is problematic, though. Changing the entire paper too much runs the risk of alienating older readers. Yet major sections may seem out-of-touch to teens and young adults when middle-age reporters pick and write the stories. As a result, says Larry Olmstead, assistant vice president for news at Knight Ridder, many adult-written youth sections assume that young people are interested only in movies and nightlife, while papers often underrepresent news and views of young people in other sections.

Giving teens editorial control may make some editors squeamish, but the youth sections considered the most well-read are high in reader-produced content. An upcoming Readership Institute study of youth sections, slated for release this summer, bears this out. Teens surveyed in focus groups preferred sections with more kid-produced editorial. "When you have kids decide what the stories are, they're going to be more authentic," argues Lorraine Eaton, founder of The Virginian-Pilot's 12-year-old teen section, "757" (named for the local area code), and the Youth Editorial Alliance, an organization of youth-section editors.

Marina Hendricks learned this as editor of the Flipside, the Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette's monthly tabloid magazine written for and by high-schoolers. She initially rewrote most of the copy, but realized teens' voices were being lost. Now, she explains, "Sometimes, we were going to have to sacrifice AP style and things like that to keep this a teen program."

To figure out what mix of products will turn young people into future subscribers, though, papers need to know much more about them, researcher Bartolomeo says. Today, most readership research focuses on adults 18 and older, which leaves newspapers with little information about how even younger people use their product.

For one, newspapers must understand how people become readers in the first place, and at what age, Bartolomeo says. He believes the habit is decided by age 30, but concedes it could be much lower. "We don't know enough to formulate a strategy that would have a reasonable chance of succeeding," he says. "What's going to happen is, readership is going to continue to erode unless someone goes to the core of the problem."

That lack of knowledge extends to the Newspaper In Education (NIE) program. Despite its nearly 50 years of existence, there's no conclusive proof the program works. Indeed, skeptics would say using schools to introduce kids to newspapers can be a surefire way to turn them off.

The Newspaper Association of America (NAA) Foundation hopes to have a better understanding of NIE's effectiveness next year, when it plans to research that question for the first time. "People will anecdotally tell you they think it [NIE] will lead to future readers of newspapers, but nobody has any hard data," says Jim Abbott, manager of education programs for the foundation.

With no likelihood of a quick advertising and circulation payoff, perhaps it's no surprise newspapers haven't acted more aggressively where youth readership is concerned. Youth sections are often quick to suffer cuts in crunch times -- there are plenty of recent examples.

And that's a shame, says Eaton, because youth sections have indirect benefits. The Virginian-Pilot's teen section, for example, helped the paper develop teen-age sources and helped nurture future talent, she says.

The NAA Foundation is trying to make such cuts less common. Its 2-year-old Teen$eek program is hoping to make youth sections financially viable by giving newspapers teen research to use in sales pitches and by funding sales reps just for youth sections.

Contrary to advertiser perceptions, teens do read newspapers -- or at least parts of them -- and now there are some data to prove it, says Toni F. Laws, senior vice president of the NAA Foundation, which oversees NIE. A survey by research and consulting firm Belden Associates for Teen$eek showed almost half of all teens on average read the teen section in their local paper.

Youth sections have limited revenue potential, however. Papers may work for advertising around proms and other events, but TV and radio are better at making emotional connections. "It's not about reaching them -- it's about connecting with them," says Ed Weiner, senior partner at media-buying firm Media First International Inc. in New York.

It may be too late for newspapers to significantly change the reading habits of Gen X, whose members are now straddling 30 -- indeed, it may even be growing late for their younger siblings in Gen Y.

The good news is, Gen Y seems to be more interested in news than Gen X, and because it's bigger in number, it stands to have a greater impact on newspaper circulation, says Michael P. Smith, managing director of the Media Management Center at Northwestern University. This group represents a "real opportunity" for newspapers, he says. Reaching this group, though, may require newspapers to look for a new definition of "mass medium."