Your Mom, Davenport, Iowa

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By: Mark Fitzgerald I subject every would-be "youth paper" I come across to the Kieran Fitzgerald Test. At 14, my oldest son is a little young for the RedEye demographic, and The Onion says he's not supposed to be reading it for another four years. But he likes the Onion. He ignores RedEye.

Your Mom aces the Kieran Fitzgerald Test. He loves everything about its print version, from the 6-by-10 1/2-inch size, to the funky typography to the blunt, street-talk writing style. It's a tribute to Your Mom's genius that a Chicago kid will devour a paper written by and for kids 200 hundred miles away in Iowa. A paper in which a Rivermont Collegiate junior recently revealed to a waiting world that his cell phone ring tone is the Trillville song Get Some Crunk In Yo' System.

With its first school year behind it, Your Mom ? a Web and print weekly created last year for the 53,032-circulation Quad-City Times by a graduate journalism class at Northwestern University ? is already proving kids can be reached by an engaging online site and a paper that reflects their lives. In the last full week of May, YourMomOnline.com averaged 1,264 unique visitors daily. Your Mom distributes 9,000 copies, including 1,400 inserted into Newspaper in Education copies of the Times.

Anyone depressed about the future of newspapers should go to one of the Wednesday-night meetings in a Quad City Times conference room where Editor Hillary Rhodes, who just turned 25, acts as the cool older sister to a near- anarchic gaggle of 18 or so high school students.

These kids don't just dream up and write the stories in Your Mom, they create the advertising ? there's a tiny budget for those local slide ads that run before the movie trailers ? and the guerrilla marketing. Their ideas range from hilarious to authentically teenage. (One suggestion unlikely to be adopted by a unit of Lee Enterprises Inc.: Go to a crowded mall and stage a mock kidnapping by a mob of kids wearing Your Mom t-shirts.) Almost none of these kids writes for the paper at their schools, where they report journalism teachers are horrified or charmed by Your Mom in roughly equal numbers. At the meeting, contributor Zach Sapato suggests how to recruit new writers: "You see that kid, who's like, 'Wow, you're a little hyper for me today' ? ask him to write."

"The sense of ownership is really powerful," Rhodes says placidly as the kids take a pizza break. -- Mark Fitzgerald

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