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Seriously. As keynote speaker at the Program Excellence Award luncheon, he acknowledged some of the problems working against the print medium, but mentioned that the U.S. newspaper industry has two competitive advantages over everyone else in the world: local news and local advertising. Bradley, publisher of The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk and president/publishing group of Landmark Communications Inc., defined competitive advantages as something that a business does better than anyone else. He praised the U.S. print industry’s ability to present local news and sell local advertisements, but pointed out that the newspaper business needs to move from a monopolistic culture to a competitive culture. Gauging one’s product against that of the competition is a way of perpetuating this attitude, he said. “Look at how competitive newsrooms and advertisers are, and look at the gap between you and those organizations. Each of our newspapers needs to be competitive to do well in the future.” Bradley noted that newspapers can flourish in the future with some fine-tuning to their approach. “We still define ourselves as newspapers, but we must start defining ourselves as the information enterprise in each of our markets,” he said. “It’s critically important to start seeing ourselves as not just newspapers.” The Newspaper In Education program has assisted in this effort by widening audiences, Bradley said. He applauded NIE’s assistance in helping newspapers to become an educational tool for younger citizens. “The work of NIE is having a significant impact on the readers of the future,” he said. “When you look at the future of newspapers, a lot of it may be rooted in this room and the work that NIE members are doing.”
Build brand loyalty with the Web |
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| Boisfeuillet Jones Jr. |
But online newspapers must be creative and offer more than just a carbon copy of the print version. For example, the Internet has evolved from a place to visit Web sites to a search engine-driven entity, Jones said. In that search-oriented world, it will be more challenging for newspapers to stand out from the pack.
“It's important that newspapers develop brand loyalty and reader habits that they’ll sustain later in life,” he said.
Newspapers, too, must evolve. But what often stands in their way is a fear of alienating or losing a large traditional audience.
Bands, essays, captions and John Lennon were the topics of discussion for the session called “Joint Adventures in YEA Promotions and NIE Programming.” Barbara Allen of the Tulsa World illustrated various projects the newspaper’s teen section and NIE have used to gain younger readers and to help establish a lifetime habit of newspaper readership.
“Tulsa World does not advertise out of its own pages,” said Allen, the Satellite adviser. “So, any promotion is an opportunity to increase our presence among teenagers who don’t know about Satellite.
Allen outlined four promotions that she and NIE Coordinator Heather Weathers used to raise interest in newspapers among young people. The contests were specifically targeted toward high school students and were designed to build a connection between students and newspapers.
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| Barbara Allen |
Allen said that these events are major successes for the Tulsa World, and they or similar programs could easily be done in other communities to promote more awareness of teen sections and NIE programs.
“Promotions that involve NIE and YEA serve as a great way to break down barriers between circulation and newsroom,” she added. “It’s fun to meet people in your news organizations and work with them on something bigger than the both of you.”
“We are swimming in a sea of narratives that students can find and share,” Dick Weiss told attendees at his session on “Brainstorming for Story Ideas.”
Weiss, writing coach and a former editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, explained that writers must learn to tell their own stories before telling someone else’s.
“You have to master the story,” he added. “You could follow a teacher’s first year at a high school; you could follow a child with developmental disabilities.”
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| Dick Weiss |
But young readers relate most to characters who care passionately about their goals and battle obstacles to achieve them, much like the characters they already know.
"They grew up with [E.B. White’s] ‘Charlotte’s Web,’ ” Weiss said. “They’ve internalized that.”
Writers should imitate children’s stories, which include many of the elements on Weiss’ “checklist” – scenes, characters, action, dialogue and passion.
And all good stories need an ending, he said. But what if the story doesn’t have one?
Weiss said writers need to find the “smaller” endings within stories. Follow a grade-obsessed student writing her first long essay, rather than waiting for her first report card.
“Endings,” he said, “don’t need to be as final as you think.”
“How many NIE coordinators work in marketing?”
Several people raised their hands.
“Circulation?”
Several more hands went up.
“The newsroom?”
The motionless quiet that followed the last question illustrated Liz Allen’s point perfectly.
Allen, youth editor at the Erie (Pa.) Times-News, posed those questions during the session “Fresh Links: How Teen Sections and NIE Can Interact to Grow Readership.” She presented the session with Anna McCartney, the paper’s NIE/literacy projects coordinator.
The replies exposed the gap between the two groups. “What exactly do they do?” one youth editor wondered aloud about NIE coordinators. Another youth editor shared her surprise at recently learning that her newspaper had an NIE coordinator.
Using a giant pad of paper, Allen listed some of the concerns shared by the room of 40 people. She said that McCartney’s move from marketing to the newsroom has promoted regular interaction between editorial and NIE.
McCartney attends daily news meetings and long-range planning meetings, so she can notify teachers about content that might be of special interest to them, and also bring the original content that NIE runs four days a week to the attention of editors. As a result, NIE content often is spotlighted on page one.
“We want young people to read; we want to increase literacy,” Allen said, stressing the common goals of each as reasons why NIE and YEA should work together.
Allen and McCartney noted that NIE content encourages use of the entire newspaper. Activities designed with this goal in mind are included with all NIE content. In addition, McCartney expressed her frustration at finding that some teachers pull out teen sections and discard the rest of the newspaper.
“It’s Newspaper In Education,” she says. “We’ve got to remember that’s the part we’re trying to sell.”
Experiment is defined as an innovative act or procedure.
In various forms, that word was emphasized by Laura Johnston, an instructor at the Missouri School of Journalism, during her session on “How to Talk So Your Reporters Will Listen.”
From brainstorming on ideas to writing the piece to the presentation of the product, Johnston said that no aspect of the reporting process is exempt from some sort of experimentation. She encouraged attendees to “think in broad strokes” and find news stories that are relevant to readers.
As an editor for the Columbia (Mo.) Missourian, where the writing staff is made up mostly of students, Johnston said she has learned to be specific about what stories require, but to allow reporters to cultivate their own ideas.
“These are the people who will be in charge in 10 years after they graduate, and they are taking with them the ideas and ideals that can translate to their peers,” Johnston said.
Johnston illustrated her point with samples of some of the work her students have produced. A series about a first-year teacher and a piece on a student’s curiosity about the history behind her university’s financial aid building were two examples of the neo-narrative style.
Such variations in writing style provide reporters with a sense of freedom, Johnston said. This experimentation in storytelling is a welcome contrast to the oft-used paragraph/quote/follow-up style and can be a breath of fresh air to readers.
Johnston noted that the act of implementing and experimenting (there’s that word again) with new formats can help a reporter “find a different audience.”
“Writing with a voice is difficult for younger writers,” she said. “Set yourself apart with your voice and perspective to the news.”
The retrieval of daily information by way of digital media has caught on with younger readers and those who prefer to get their news in a condensed fashion. However, just placing stories online does not suffice for some outlets wanting to tell the news.
Some publications attach audio or video clips to stories. An increasing number of media executives are looking at this as the way future news will be absorbed.
“We are trying to show that this is the way the industry is going and also how the younger audiences are going to want to get their news,” Johnston said.
And so the experimenting continues.
Aja J. Junior (aja_junior@yahoo.com), Josh Mosley (jdmk34@mizzou.edu) and Becky Tsadik (rtsadik@northwestern.edu) covered the 2006 Young Reader Conference as interns for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
What do teens want from their newspapers? They want to “date” them.
Using an amusing skit to introduce that concept, the 2006 Young Reader Conference Teen Fellows told an audience of youth editors and NIE professionals that the best way to draw young people into the newspaper is to build a relationship with them.
The fellows explained that this can be done in four easy steps, just like those a guy follows when he’s interested in dating a girl.
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| The 2006 teen fellows are (from left): Katie Thisdell, The Edge, Roanoke (Va.) Times; Nikki Roberti, The Verge, Florida Today, Melbourne, Fla.; Andre Haughton, Next Generation, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Fort Lauderdale; Emily Hamsher, FlipSide, The Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette; Chris Thomas, Listen Up, The Daily News, Jacksonville, N.C.; Stephanie McMullen, 757: Teens Cover the Code, The Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk; Kaitlin Paulson, Generation Next, The Santa Fe New Mexican; Samantha Liggett, The Student Sun, The Evening Sun, Hanover, Pa.; Kiersten Timpe, Voices, Reading (Pa.) Eagle; Brittany Biesiada, Teen Scene, Home News Tribune, East Brunswick, N.J.; Rebecca Espinosa, Teen Speaks, The Miami Herald; Gabby Gee, The Voice, The State Journal-Register, Springfield, Ill.; and Serenity Self, Fresh Ink, Erie (Pa.) Times-News. |
Next, the fellows talked about what teens want from teen sections themselves. They urged youth editors to encourage their staff members to write for their peers, not for their parents or teachers. The main audience of the section should be ages 15-18. It still will appeal to those who are younger, because they aspire to be like older teens and will take on those same interests.
The fellows said that teen sections should offer variety – everything from hard-hitting topics to fluff; long articles to short; opinion columns to question-and-answer pieces; essays to profiles. Teen reporters should include some depth in their stories and really get to know their sources. They should not just skim the surface in their reporting.
Blogs and writer bios should be featured on the teen section Web site, the fellows said. This shows readers that teen writers are just like them – regular teens. Encourage reader involvement by asking for feedback. Build a “community” by creating a page on MySpace.com, the social networking site, that links to the teen section’s Web site. Include a community calendar on the teen section’s Web site with volunteer opportunities, concerts and festivals in the area.
The fellows also recommended a regular “teens on the street” feature in the print component. The more teens you put in the paper, they said, the more readers you'll get.
Last but certainly not least, the fellows discussed what NIE can do for teens.
Few teens are aware of what NIE is, they said. It needs to be more visible in high schools, and make teens aware that the newspaper helps them relate to world happenings. A teen advisory board could help NIE coordinators spread the word at school about what the program is. These teens could encourage their teachers to use the program as well.
Kelsea Gurski is editor of The Voice at The State Journal-Register in Springfield, Ill., and Marina Hendricks is editor at the NAA Foundation. They can be reached at marina.hendricks@naa.org.
We know that our future depends on reaching young readers right now.
We know that if they don’t read us now, they won’t read us or look at our Web sites when they get older.
We know that these potential teen readers are a big group, some 33 million of them in the United States, the biggest at any time ever.
And we know that they love to ring the cash registers of our advertisers.
So, we’re all set to move. We look in our newsroom. We reflect on our days as teenagers. We target that 28-year-old features writer and think, “She’s pretty hip, let’s see what she thinks should be in the teen section.”
Right?
Wrong.
The launch and implementation of successful teen coverage has to start with an admission: They are not us.
Whether we are 23 or 63, this group does not see the world the same way we saw it when we were teens. So, the test of any teen coverage has to be: How much of it is content produced by teens, and how much of it is about teens?
Teenage Research Unlimited does qualitative and quantitative research on teen America. In a presentation titled “A Multimedia Journey Beneath the Surface of Today’s Teens,” TRU Vice President Michael Wood laid out five basic ways to describe this generation.
1.They are “maturiteens.” We all know they are 15 going on 25. They are exposed to sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. But guess what? Drug use, teen pregnancies and violent crime are all declining. They’re into religion, their parents and virginity. They admire success. They have accurately been described as the “lean-forward generation” or “exposed and composed.” As one teen in Wood’s presentation put it, “Smart is the new cool.” They are into family, but it’s not “Leave It to Beaver,” it’s “Meet the Barkers.”
2.They are virtual intimates. It’s the MySpace.com thing. They are hooked into each other in virtual communities, in bigger ways than we can even imagine. “My friends and I enjoy being alone together” is the mantra of this generation.
3.They are re-generators. This means they are very willing to forgive us our sins. It probably comes from the videogame reset-button mentality. Consider their stars (Kobe Bryant, Paris Hilton, etc.). They’ll forgive Nokia for making brick phones, not flip phones. They are giving us licenses to take chances, to make some whiffs. They’ll embrace our next good idea.
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| Michael Wood of Teenage Research Unlimited takes conference attendees on “A Multimedia Journey Beneath the Surface of Today’s Teens.” Inset: Audrey Eoff from Weslaco, Texas, seeks input from the audience during an activity that Wood used to kick off his presentation. |
4.They are armchair activists. Sixty-three percent of them want to make the world better, but only 25 percent actually volunteer. They’re not into planting seeds. They want their activism to pay off now. They want to see the real heroes of their community. They want to see peers who make a difference. They want to be presented with these opportunities. Is this a place where we (and our advertisers) can be catalysts?
5.They are “back-storians.” They are inquisitive about the story behind the story (see Us Weekly’s look behind magazine cover photo shoots). They want to know how stuff works.
Getting to know this group would be the first step in reaching it.
Bob Rose is assistant managing editor/editing and presentation editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He can be reached at brose@post-dispatch.com.
| Copyright 2008, Newspaper Association of America Foundation |
