Hello, anybody out there? Hmm. The newspaper industry is once again trying to figure out how to entice the 18-to-29 crowd into reading papers before they’re lost forever to television, magazines and cyberspace. This is a monumental task, of course, given that many of the Generation X ilk view newspapers as totally uncool. So newspapers across the nation have come up with the obvious solution: slap a gloss of hipness in the paper and see what happens. Sprouting up among the bread-and-butter coverage are specially targeted 20-something sections, additional pages and even brand-new publications – each with a cool name like tel X.
Newspapers have never had an easy time grabbing younger readers, but the stakes are higher now. About half of all young people read a daily newspaper today, compared to about two thirds in the early 1970s. But it’s no longer a sure bet that 20-somethings will develop a newspaper habit as they age (people around 55 are the most regular readers). Younger people – and their parents – are turning increasingly to competing media, some of which, like cable and cyberspace, hardly existed 20 years ago. This is scary for news executives, because the 20s have long been seen as the last chance to establish a reading routine. “Newspapers have to change” to be relevant to young readers, says Al Gollin, research director for the Newspaper Association of America.
One of the first to try was The New York Times, and its experience showed the pitfalls in trying to appeal to an entire generation in a special section. Its Styles section, appearing Sundays, featured such overly striving hip stories as body piercing and the arm as a fashion instrument. Amid the establishment Times, the section was sniped at as a hokey attempt to spiff up the old gray lady, as effective as putting the WonderBra on Kate Moss. After four editors in two years and sluggish advertising, the section was scaled back last month and lost its color pictures.
Other smaller papers, unburdened by the weightiness of the Times, have started similar sections. The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, a 64,000-circulation daily in Indiana, began publishing a thrice-weekly page last October called next. The stories are intentionally eclectic, featuring everything from how to handle a mortgage to a first-person account of getting tattooed (a favorite topic among youth sections). Steve Byrne, the 25-year-old editor of next, says the section doesn’t want to be the arbiter of cool, nor does it aspire to write stories that will appeal to everyone between 18 and 29. “We don’t want to be the grunge record-review page, and we don’t want to be the business page, either,” he says. “We just throw the scraps out there and see if the dogs chase them.” The paper says half the Gazette’s readers turn to the page, a bit higher than expected.
Some papers are raising their hipness quotient more cautiously. The Macon Telegraph in Georgia runs a weekly youth-oriented column, After the Boom, written by staffers in the target age group. And each month it runs a special page, tel X, that has included articles on interracial dating, the 1970s retro fad and a statistical look at Generation X – all displayed in fashionably snazzy layouts.
For all these efforts, though, some newspapers have decided that adding a few pages or stories will never attract young readers in large numbers – and may only turn off regular readers. Instead, they’ve decided to go after young readers with separate publications. In Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., the Sun-Sentinel Company created XS, a free weekly tabloid distributed at theaters and stores. Editor Steve Wissink says the company concluded the Sun-Sentinel is a “fine, successful paper. Let’s not mess with success; let’s put out something different.” Newspaper chain Knight-Ridder also is considering a newspaper/magazine hybrid for younger readers. Says Reg Bragonier, Knight-Ridder’s special-publications director, “They may not gravitate to your core product, but at least they are reading something and it’s your product.”
Maybe newspapers shouldn’t give up so soon. There are strategies other than writing breathlessly about Nirvana. Eric Liu, founder of The Next Progressive, a 20-something magazine, argues, “Flashy graphics and snappy stories won’t necessarily work. A lot of young people would rather just have intelligently written pieces. People in this generation are savvy enough to know when they are being talked down to.” Media critic Jon Katz, writing in Wired magazine, says the newspaper industry’s “relentless alienation of the young is the corporate equivalent of a scandal.” He suggests that kids’ taste is no mystery – “They like their media with attitude and lots of point-of-view.” A Katz role model: “Beavis and Butt-head.” Which suggests we’re in a lot worse shape than we thought.
