Oh My God! They Killed 'Your Mom'

By: Mark Fitzgerald Your Mom is dead.

Or, as the Quad-City Times in Davenport, Iowa, crudely and kind of cruelly puts it on the former site of the unique print/Web community product: "Your Mom is no longer online!"

Your Mom is dead, and we should all mourn that fact, because apart from whatever market-specific facts led to its demise in Iowa, this quirky product dreamed up by a bunch of journalism grad students represented the best effort ever to attract U.S. teenagers to newspapers.

"Newspapers know that teenagers are the future, and that they've got to get them, but what they come up with is so lame that teenagers see right through them," Rich Gordon told me Thursday. "And here was something that teenagers actually thought was a cool thing, and literally I haven't seen anything in the newspaper industry ... that came anywhere close to connecting with teenagers like Your Mom did."

Gordon is an associate professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, and directs their Digital Technology in Education program. It was his class of grad students who created Your Mom under a contract with the Lee Enterprises newspaper.

Gordon was preaching to the choir in our conversation. E&P named Your Mom one of our "Ten That Do It Right" newspaper products in 2005, when it was not quite even a year old.

I'd heard good things about Your Mom from afar, but I was sold when I attended one of the regular Wednesday night sessions of the 18 or so kids who put out the Your Mom print version every week. It was like no other news budget meeting I'd ever sat in on, with an electric energy charged even more by the fact that it was teenagers -- teenagers! -- churning out ideas to use a newspaper to communicate with their peers.

I drove back to Chicago that night fairly bursting with optimism about the future of newspapers. I knew even more that Your Mom was onto something when my son, then 14, devoured the copies I had brought back. A Chicago kid was avidly reading content written by and for kids 200 hundred miles away in Bix Beiderbecke's birthplace.

As it turns out, that spring night I was witnessing pretty much the high-water mark for Your Mom.

A few months later, Hillary Rhodes, the high-energy Medill student the Quad-City Times hired to be the founding editor/cool big sister to Your Mom, was herself hired away by The Associated Press for its own youth-oriented initiative, asap.

After her departure, the Times almost immediately killed the print version of Your Mom, a funky and narrow (6-by-10 1/2 inches) mini-tab with funky typography and teenaged reporting that either horrified or charmed advisors of area high school papers.

Without the print product promoting the online community, Web traffic apparently slowed, not helped, Will Sullivan told me, by content that was not often refreshed.

"They cut the promotion vehicle, and without that, the tumbleweeds started to blow," he said. Sullivan, who is now interactive projects editor at PalmBeachPost.com, was on the team that created Your Mom.

It was his little baby, Sullivan said. But these days, the newspaper industry is like Sparta: babies that don't thrive get abandoned in the hills.

"A lot of publications like to try new initiatives, but they don't give them the time to get off the ground," Sullivan said. "These media organizations have been working on building brand for a hundred or more years, but they want (new products) to catch on right away."

Times Publisher Julie Bechtel, in a telephone interview Friday, said the decision to close Your Mom, which went off-line Sept. 15, was strictly business. ?We expected to lose money the first year, and even into the second year -- but we were far exceeding the amount we expected to lose,? she said.

The print product had trouble getting into schools, and its rack returns were running a very high 60%, Bechtel added. And while the Web site quickly ramped up from 20,000 users monthly to 70,000, it settled back to about its original level by the end. ?We had very little advertiser interest, either in the print or the Web product,? Bechtel added.

There was no denying the excitement Your Mom?s writers felt for the print product, Bechtel adds, and the paper is likely to try again to reach teenagers. ?We just felt it was better to start over with something new? when that time comes, she said.

There were, no doubt, other factors at work against Your Mom. For one thing, Your Mom lost its Chinaman, as a few politically incorrect but politically connected people still say at City Hall here in Chicago. Publisher Mike Phelps, who committed to Your Mom on the spot after the grad students' nervous presentation, left Lee to join Clarity Media. A big booster in Lee corporate took on new responsibilities away from Davenport, and the editor left.

"Obviously, it wasn't making sufficient profit, or maybe any profit at all," Gordon said, in an interview before Bechtel confirmed the paper was a money-loser. "And in this day and age, in a publicly owned newspaper company, this kind of initiative is hard to keep alive."

Gordon noted that two youth efforts launched after Your Mom that also now feature a Web community promoted with a tabloid -- The Bakersfield Californian's Bakotopia, and Beep at the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago -- are both family-owned newspapers.

"That's a key question for the newspaper industry: How do publicly owned newspaper companies do initiatives for new audiences when you have this demand for short-term profit?" Gordon said.

The Quad-City Times decision to pull the plug on Your Mom was understandable, Gordon said, and I had to agree.

But still. "On that level it's a perfectly rational decision," he said, "but I also know for at least a year that product connected with teens in the Quad Cities market in a way that nothing else ever did, or has since."