Youth Pages Draw More Than Just Youth

Youth sections and NIE pages offer a variety of elements that increase readership by adults–from insights into the lives and minds of teenagers to popular serial stories to simplified explanations of serious topics. Such elements are becoming quite the attraction.

By Kristy Eckert

A middle-aged woman in Longmont, Colo., phoned Cindy Piller, NIE coordinator of the Daily Times-Call, to say thanks for the paper’s youth section series on how America came to war in Iraq.

The simplified explanation was the only way the woman could figure out what was happening in the rest of the paper and on the newscasts, Piller recalls.

Across the country, Sue Shafer got a similar compliment.

She was finishing her meet-and-greet at a Rotary Club luncheon, preparing to sit down, when a well-respected community member pulled her aside.

“You can’t tell anyone,” he said to her. “I’m a closet Mini-Page reader.”

The man thanked her for printing The Mini-Page, a nationally syndicated section that Shafer runs in the Tribune Chronicle in Warren, Ohio.

He told her he had been sitting with a group of distinguished people discussing the Electoral College, and while few of them understood it, he was able to explain it–thanks to an elementary-level description in that youth-oriented section.

“After reading The Mini-Page,” he said to Shafer, “I sounded so smart.”

That man from Northeast Ohio and his counterpart in Longmont are far from alone.

As newspapers nationwide fight to snag young readers, sections aimed at young students and teens are gaining in popularity. More than 100 daily newspapers offer weekly youth sections, and many more use The Mini-Page and syndicated serial stories. But while many of the sections–the teen ones, especially–tout themselves as by youth and for youth, their readership extends far beyond that.

The sections offer a variety of elements to interest adults–from popular serial stories to simplified explanations of serious topics to insights into the lives and minds of notoriously closed-off teenagers. So they serve a purpose that often goes unnoticed: drawing adult readers. There aren’t numbers to prove youth and teen sections actually increase readership, but those working the frontlines are confident that their pages are delivering the goods readers want–and what they may lack in hard statistics, they make up for with anecdotal evidence.

Many youth editors say that most of their feedback comes from adults, whether they are parents, teachers or community members.

“This is one of the very, very few sources where [adults] can hear the voices of the teenagers of the next generation behind them,” says Jen Butler, editor of Next Generation, the youth section of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale.

Teen sections are “a window into the lives of teens” for the people responsible for those youth, according to Guy Coviello, who edits Page One, the Tribune Chronicle’s teen section.

But Ken Krayeske, who runs the Hartford Courant’s monthly teen section, MetroBridge, thinks youth sections appeal even to those without kids.

“Most media portrayals of youth right now are through adult filters,” Krayeske says. “What youth newspaper does is put in adults’ hands things constructed by youth.”

Leigh Sprimont, who edits The Buzz, the weekly teen tabloid of The Sun in Charlotte Harbor, Fla., says older people in town seem to be the section’s biggest fans. Like other youth editors, she gets more response from adults than teens.

James Broomall, a senior citizen, wrote a letter to The Buzz earlier this year, commending it as his favorite section of the newspaper.

“The youth who write those intelligent articles found in The Buzz, obviously, have their pulse on the youth scene of today. I praise the editorials. They are insightful with a discerning perspective on the world in which we all live,” he wrote. “I find more insight and intelligent information in the articles found in The Buzz than in the rest of the paper.”

Serial Readers

Syndicated serial stories, which run on many NIE pages across the country, draw readers of all ages. Some of the most vocal fans are senior citizens, who often clip the stories to read to or send to grandchildren–or just plain follow the stories for themselves.

People who run these pages have a plethora of anecdotes about avid serial story readers.

In Maine, one woman and her neighbor meet on Tuesday mornings to discuss the serial story over coffee, according to Donna Fransen, former NIE coordinator of the Bangor Daily News.

At a retirement home in South Carolina, a group of residents built a robot out of a trash can and kitchen utensils after following a serial story about kids who build a robot, says Robie Scott, NIE coordinator of The Post and Courier in Charleston.

But those hardly touch the story of a man in Detroit, who wanted to reschedule a Florida vacation with his wife so as not to miss two installments of a serial story about the Wright Brothers. (At his wife’s prompting, he called Jacki Hagel, assistant manager of the NIE program at The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press, who promised to, and did, send him the two clips.)

Simplified explanations of everything from the Electoral College to the war in Iraq also have won rave reviews from many adults.

An older reader of The News-Journal in Daytona Beach Fla., had voted for 60 years and didn’t understand the Electoral College until it was explained in The Mini-Page, he told Nancy Govoni, who coordinates the NIE program for that paper.

Besides offering practical help, youth sections also offer feel-good news, fun stuff and inspiration of sorts that people often complain the “regular” sections of the newspaper lack.

A high school security guard in Connecticut was so touched by one young man’s tale that he gave him $72. The teen had written a cover story in MetroBridge, the paper’s youth section, about going out of town to visit his “so-called father” and getting stiffed out of the cash his mom had sent for his train ride home. The security guard wanted to compensate for the father’s negligence.

Krayeske has watched similar things happen, thanks to teen writing.

“Youth voices need to be heard by everyone,” he says, “whether or not you have kids.”

He thinks that the youth benefit from getting to write, but that the adults benefit even more. And if adults will listen to what the teens are saying, societal changes can actually start to occur.

In 30 years, Krayeske predicts every daily newspaper in the country will have a youth section.

“I think,” he says of youth writing, “it really is a great equalizer.”

Kristy Eckert, a news reporter for The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, can be reached at keckert@dispatch.com.