'RedEye' Vs. 'Red Streak' In Windy City Grudge Match

By: Mark Fitzgerald For all its hype outside the city, the Wednesday kickoff of the youth newspaper war between the Chicago Tribune's RedEye and the Chicago Sun-Times' Red Streak was a pretty low-key affair around downtown commuter stations.

And for all the industry anticipation, these first stabs at standalone tabloids targeting young adults aged 18 to 34 made pretty underwhelming first impressions.

The biggest surprise probably was how ugly the RedEye front page was for its formal debut, labeled "Premiere Edition" on the front page. The first three preview issues released on Friday, Monday, and Tuesday featured crisp layouts that took full advantage of the Tribune's long experience with great color. Wednesday's issue was a mass of black with a reverse-type "Top 10 reasons to read this newspaper" that couldn't decide if it was supposed to be funny or just a mishmash of refers. It had the smudgy look of the New York Post before it installed its new Goss color offset presses.

Red Streak -- a hurried catch-up project launched when word of the Tribune newspaper leaked -- sported a front page that looked like far more thought had gone into its design. Red Streak also remembered to include a few babes for the boys: the front page featured photos of Sarah Jessica Parker, Winona Ryder, and Christina Aguilera.

In fact, another big difference between the two papers is that Red Streak remembered to be, well, a newspaper. Among the elements it includes that are missing from the Trib's RedEye are comics or any cartoons at all, a crossword puzzle, and a full TV listing. RedEye does devote a page to TV, but its only listing is a "Tonight's Best." From the picks, it appears the paper cribbed the list from what's playing in Hell tonight: Ed, Dawson's Creek, The Bachelor, The Lost Boys, South Park, and, as an apparent bone to the brainiacs in its readership, The West Wing.

In a "From the Editors" note, RedEye describes itself as "smartly edited, attractively packaged, and built for speed." But like Red Streak, the first edition is mostly content repurposed from the Mother Ship.

Smartly edited? Here's how the lede of one story ran on the front page of the grown-ups' Chicago Tribune: "Oprah Winfrey and 74 other big-bucks Chicagoans, foundations, and corporations will have their names literally carved in stone after agreeing to ante up at least $1 million apiece for art, gardens, and architectural flourishes at the controversial and ultra-high-profile green space taking shape at Michigan Avenue and Randolph Street."

Here's the lede after it was smartly edited: "Oprah Winfrey and 74 other big-bucks Chicagoans, foundations, and corporations will have their names carved (literally) in stone after agreeing to ante up at least $1 million apiece for art, gardens, and architectural flourishes at the controversial green space taking shape at Michigan Avenue and Randolph Street." Sometimes all it takes are well-placed parentheses to transform a story, eh?

Similarly, much of Red Streak's content was culled from the Sun-Times, other Hollinger International Inc. papers and even the National Post in Toronto, which was founded by Conrad Black.

RedEye has two big advantages over Red Streak, however: sports and entertainment.

RedEye's sports pages have the most innovative features in the paper. Pro basketball and hockey standings are handled particularly cleverly. They stretch across the page like horse entries in the Daily Racing Form and include comments that feature the best -- and probably only unforced -- humor in the newspaper. RedEye also wisely puts Steven Rosenbloom's column up-front, in contrast to Tribune, which buries him so far inside he might as well be in the Witness Protection Program.

Red Streak, on the other hand, does not reflect the excellent sports section of its parent. About the only thing you can say for it is that it's short.

Because it launched on a Wednesday, RedEye included a 20-page version of Metromix (http://metromix.com), the Tribune's well-regarded entertainment Web site. RedEye preview issues also promised something any paper could do: run a schedule of the night's concerts and club events.

Each paper also features a few little elements that are simply annoying, along with a few that are pretty clever.

Among the RedEye annoyances: An inquiring-photographer feature that gives the ages of respondents, all of whom, of course, are safely within the 18-34 demographic target. The effect is to treat adults as if they were fifth-graders assigned to write a letter to the president ("I am 11 years old, and I think ... "). Among RedEye's clever bits is "Fivecast," a vertical strip that uses a cartoon character with an odd expression to illustrate the weather forecast. Like a real Chicagoan, he's still in just his suit coat for a Friday prediction of 37 degrees.

Red Streak annoyances: The columnists stumbling out of the blocks. One wastes 800 words pretending to be outraged that Pizza Hut is offering Chicago-style deep-dish pizza while the other proclaims himself a curmudgeon and labels his space "P.O.'d" just in case a reader doesn't get the point. Red Streak's clever bits include "The Concrete Runway," a fashion-from-the-street feature.