Beckoning to the Lost Generation
“Newspapers have always had a problem with young readers,” Guzzo told us. “Usually when they start having families and laying down roots, that’s when they become newspaper readers on a regular basis. But the baby boom generation–never knowing what it was like to be without TV and, more importantly, being the generation that postponed getting married, having kids, buying the house–don’t have the same stake in their communities and in the issues newspapers traditionally have covered as staples–education, taxes, the pretty basic newspaper issues.
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The Knight-Ridder chain’s response is famous in the industry. It’s the 25/43 Project, an R&D crusade launched in 1989 to recover that lost generation. Knight-Ridder worked up flashy prototypes of special sections that stressed graphics and brevity; a 25/43 newsletter to employees was laced with the kind of injunctions that make traditionalists tremble: “Tone should be insiderish, passionate, emphatic.” “Advertising must be treated as content.” Think of the target audience as “potential users, rather than readers.”
If you read the Chicago Tribune at all attentively, you’ve noticed the same sort of concerns being worked out there. It’s all happening in a much lower key. But page two now carries a “Young Reader’s Guide” directing an audience that scarcely used to know page two existed to such treasures farther in as (to choose a back issue at random) a report on prom dresses, a Bob Greene column about grade-schoolers visiting Washington, and a preview of a TV show on Bugs Bunny’s 50th birthday.
“Most of the response to the teen panel has been from adults, which was a little surprise,” Curwen said, “although as a rule they’re more likely to write.”
“Kids really look at the dog as having a personality,” Lux told us. That’s why an animated Spots is starring in a new Tribune ad campaign.
Trust us, though. Nothing’s out of the question.
