Amid the recent attempts to cultivate young readers, the Chicago Tribune's RedEye, first published in 2002, has been the most criticized, praised and, perhaps, successful. Every article in RedEye is short. The whole paper, says Jane Hirt, RedEye's editor, is designed to be read in 20 minutes or less. RedEye prints about 100,000 copies every day. A 2004 survey by Gallup shows the paper reaches about 600,000 city residents every week; its readership has grown at a time when both the Tribune and the Sun-Times have faced circulation declines.
According to Brad Moore, RedEye's general manager, more than half of the paper's readers are between the ages of 18 and 34, substantially younger than readers of other papers in the city. To Hirt, this proves that young people do indeed want to be informed. "A lot of people said it would never work, because young people don't want to read the news," she says. "But they do want to read the news. They do want to know what's going on." It's just that they also want some fun with their news, she says.
RedEye features local stories as well as national news, mostly from wire services. It even includes original reporting. Last year, RedEye was the only Chicago paper to note every rape reported to police in the city, and at the end of the year it used that data to show that sexual assaults were not limited to lower-class areas but occurred in every city neighborhood during the year.
RedEye, however, is unlikely to provide anyone with a working knowledge of current events. "Too Sexy for Work? Don't Let Wardrobe Malfunction Hurt Your Chance for Success," read the paper's cover headline of Jan. 24. The day before, the cover feature focused on the increasing popularity of cosmetic dental jewelry among hip-hop wannabe youths. The headline: "Grills Gone Wild." Both the how-to-dress story and the dental-bling story ran for two pages, as much space as the paper devotes to all national and international news combined.
"If you can pull out some of the news, throw in a little entertainment, and get more people interested in the newspaper, that might be OK," Mindich says of papers like RedEye. But "some of these papers are pulling out so much news content they are no longer serving as a vehicle to hold leaders accountable." In other words, they're no longer newspapers; they're brochures with factoids.
Hirt, who worked on the foreign news desk at the Tribune before coming to RedEye, defends her paper. RedEye isn't dumbing down the news for young people, she insists; rather, it's giving them a slice that they can consume while they've got nothing better to do, like riding the train. And if they want more than what's in RedEye, they certainly know where they can find it. Plus, she points out: "It's better than nothing." The paper's research shows that it has attracted many people who would not otherwise have read any daily newspaper.
But the problem with taking solace in RedEye's success is that it feels like settling for ignorance. Niche publications may have begun as starter papers, publications to get young people associated with the brand of a newspaper, but many papers are coming to realize that for some readers, the niche may be the entire ballgame.
People who read RedEye aren't necessarily graduating to the Tribune. (Brad Moore, RedEye's general manager, says he doesn't believe RedEye has cannibalized regular Tribune readers; although with the Tribune's circulation steady or declining, that would seem plausible.) But the Tribune is OK with the notion of people sticking to RedEye and not moving on to the big paper. RedEye, says Moore, has become a success on its own, and the company wins even if young people don't pick up the weightier paper. "We target a coveted demographic," Moore says, "and we're able to deliver a product whose audience is significantly younger. We've been able to attract advertisers that didn't feel it was affordable to be in the Chicago Tribune. We've picked up a significant amount from advertisers that had never run in the Tribune."
Mary Stier, who publishes the Des Moines Register, echoes this idea about her paper's spinoff, Juice. The Register, Iowa's venerable daily, is owned by the Gannett Corp., the newspaper giant that publishes 91 U.S. papers, including USA Today, by far the nation's most popular newspaper. Juice inclines toward breezy featurettes and Q-and-A-style interviews. A recent Juice cover shows a smiling white woman dropping a coin into a ceramic piggy bank under the headline, "Pinching Pennies: How to Save $3,600 in the Next Year." Inside readers can get the lowdown on consignment shopping or the fun of visiting the State Historical Society. But Stier isn't selling Juice as compelling journalism. It is what it is -- an attempt to get young people to read something in an ultimate effort to make money on advertisements.
"Now that there are other media options available to them, we can't expect when this marketplace turns 35 they're going to subscribe to the Des Moines Register," Stier says. "But we can continue to slice out other publications and Web sites that meet their needs. They may not read the newspaper every day, but say they read it three times a week and pick up Juice and go on the Web site seven days a week. Then, I'm happy."
Worrying about dumbed-down newspapers may seem old-fashioned in the age of the Web. If RedEye overruns Chicago, and Juice takes down Des Moines, everyone in those cities, even wide-eyed, 16-year-old would-be news junkies, will have access to the Web and to the depth of knowledge contained in the Times, the Washington Post, or countless blogs and other sources of news.
And there's evidence that online versions of newspapers can attract a sizable audience, even one slightly younger than that of the print paper. According to Nielsen//Netratings, a firm that measures traffic online, many of the top 10 most popular newspaper Web sites receive significant traffic from people aged 25 to 34; at some sites, this audience accounts for more than a quarter of monthly visitors. Moreover, a Pew survey conducted last June showed that though young people were leaving print newspapers, they were still going to newspapers' Web sites. Carroll Doherty, editor of the Pew Center, says that the poll seemed to show that an equal share of young people and older people think of newspapers as a "main source" of news; it's just that the younger group preferred to get the paper online.
Yet at the same time, as Mindich points out, while the Web gives us greater access to news, it also gives us more non-news, too. "If you wanted to know everything about what Jack Abramoff did, you can learn it online," he says. "Or you could not, and look at something else."
I came to the Web when it was still in its infancy, when some of the most compelling content online was from newspapers that I didn't have access to in print format. Things are different today; there's so much more besides newspapers. Today, with its lightning-fast downloads and online multimedia, it's easy to see why the Internet, as Mindich says, "is also the best place for avoiding the news completely."
Rob Curley disagrees. Curley, the gregarious 35-year-old new media director of the Naples Daily News in Naples, Fla., says he knows why people have been turning away from newspapers and knows exactly how to bring them back in order to both entertain and educate them.
Next page: Where other media pander, Curley attracts young people by running comprehensive features
