RED-COLORED GLASSES

It’s the first birthday of Chicago’s “Red” papers, the tabs put out by the city’s traditional newspapers to capture younger readers, and the city’s alternative weeklies attended with predictably skeptical expressions on their faces.

The Reader and Newcity Chicago noted that the tabs, Red Streak (a product of the Sun-Times) and RedEye (a product of the Tribune), have decreased circulation of the dailies but are not generating much circulation revenue of their own. That is, almost no one is paying to buy the Reds.

“Circulation seems like a nightmare now, with stacks and stacks of the papers throughout the city laying around at the end of the day,” Kate Zambreno writes in
Newcity Chicago.

“Anyone who pays a quarter for either Red is a sap,” Michael Miner says in the Reader.

Both writers cite audit figures that admit that only about 11 percent of RedEye readers pay, 9,000 out of 80,000 copies -- and it’s unknown how many more are the “stacks and stacks” of unread copies. Red Streak figures are likely to be similar, although its owners offer no official count.

What’s going on? Although the Red Streak editor describes the effort in terms of a rescue effort (“And so, thank God, the Tribune did something to sort of force newspapers around the country to take a look”), the Reds, the Metros that preceded them and the junk that is to follow, such as amNewYork, are not the best solution to the generational decline in readership these tabs were meant to end.

That decline is indisputable. “Daily newspaper readership among people under thirty-five dropped from two-thirds in 1965 to one-third in 1990,” writes Harvard scholar Robert D. Putnam in his “Bowling Alone,” and now the industry doesn’t even bother to tout daily readership. Instead it cites readership on “an average weekday.”

The Fall 2003 Competitive Media Index, put out by the Newspaper Association of America, puts that percent of adults -- and adults just in the top 50 media markets -- at 54.1, with association leader John F. Sturm giving some credit to the “many new and innovative marketing strategies newspapers across the country are adopting [and] the launch of niche publications targeting younger readers and underserved markets.”

The association and the American Society of Newspaper Editors are backing a “readership initiative study,” the index press release says, with the study of “younger adult readers of local, English-language daily newspapers” taking place, interestingly, in Illinois. Evanston, home of Northwestern University, but Illinois nonetheless, not too far from Chicago, the home of the Reds.

The study isn’t likely to, and shouldn’t, focus on the Reds too much, if at all, or newspapers will continue to degrade and delude themselves.

To give a sense of how far off the Reditors are, I’ll just straight-out steal extensively from Zambreno’s Newcity piece:

“Both editors of the red papers say that while in their twenties, they were avid newspaper readers. But not everyone is, they assert, and papers like RedEye appeal to a different type of reader. [Mary Nesbitt, of Northwestern University] theorizes that the content and presentation behind daily newspapers don’t appeal to younger readers. ‘Perhaps that group doesn't see itself in the paper, so it doesn't seem to be about them,’ she muses. ‘If it doesn't have visuals, photos, people like them, then it might not appear to be for them.’ Many agree that newspapers have not concentrated enough on staying relevant.

“Both editors talk about how their papers are edited to appeal to the targeted demographic. Although Red Streak gets the majority of its news content from the core paper, and RedEye relies heavily on the Tribune as well as wire services, ‘the trick is to edit them and write headlines in an appropriate manner that appeals to the younger reader, and cuts to the chase and gives them information that we know they're looking for,’ says [Deborah Douglas, the editor of Red Streak] ‘as opposed to just writing these long treatises every day and expecting people to slog through to the very end to find out what the information is about.’ ”

So young readers want headlines and copy that “cuts to the chase and gives them information,” while adults are expected to “slog through to the very end” of “these long treatises.” And like it, apparently. Gosh, we’re so smart and responsible. Meanwhile, newspapers need “visuals, photos,” and -- the other universal message of the youth tabs -- short articles. Short enough that a reader can graze several in the length of a trip on public transportation.

For a clue as to how dramatically newspapers are going astray, stop by your local high school and college campuses and get copies of their student-run, student-produced newspapers. What you’ll see are newspapers that look pretty much like the newspapers put out by adults: generally traditional layouts; relatively sparse photos; typically lengthy, in-depth articles. Can the students simply be imitating adult newspapers because they think that’s what’s expected? Possibly. But what would make other students actually pick up the paper and read it, if its articles were too long and it looked so plain and unappealing? And, if students weren’t picking it up, for how long would a newspaper go on reading and looking the same way before evolving into something that would capture readers?

The fact that the readers are already captive may have more to do with it, in that there are fewer sources for relevant news for those high school and college readers. But that still underlines that the secret of readership is content, not visuals.

Perhaps tellingly, it is difficult to track down anyone who’s studying high school or college newspapers. Even the Poynter Institute, the Florida school and journalism think tank, had difficulty identifying anyone who is an expert in, or even interested in, these publications -- even though they are where the readers of the future, as well as its journalists, are coming from.

“The problem is, we haven’t been changing at the rate we should have been changing to appeal to a new generation of readers,” says Douglas, of the Red Streak. Maybe so. But the change can’t be for them; it has to be for all of us.