Feature
Building From Within
An editor shares his youth section expertise with his newspaper’s chain.
By Travis Loop
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Papers owned by Ogden Newspapers Inc. are learning the ins and outs of running a teen program from Guy Coviello (center), editor of Page One at Ogden’s Tribune Chronicle in Warren, Ohio. Here, he helps Diana Walsh (left) and Reena Singh (right) prepare for their presentation at the 2005 Youth Editorial Alliance Conference.
PHOTO BY JAN DIEHM
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While youth content is not uncommon in newspapers around the country, the ability of the Tribune Chronicle to attract a younger audience in the seemingly mature market of Warren, Ohio, has been exceptional.
Warren is located in Trumbull County, which has the second-oldest population of the Buckeye State’s 88 counties. Yet despite the older demographics, the Tribune Chronicle boasts a 57 percent penetration rate in the 18-to-24 age bracket – the best of any daily paper in a five-county area, according to Assistant Managing Editor Guy Coviello.
As a result, Ogden Newspapers Inc. in Wheeling, W.Va., the Tribune Chronicle’s parent company, has informally tapped Coviello to teach editors and Newspaper In Education (NIE) managers throughout the chain the secrets to his paper’s success.
Much of the credit goes to Page One, which has become the model for many youth sections. The for-teens-by-teens section, created in 1990 and overseen by Coviello since ’94, won the 2003 and 2004 NAA Foundation awards for general program excellence.
Among the section’s more defining elements, Coviello says, is the skill with which the student journalists from local high schools ply their trade. Before students are allowed to join the Page One staff, they must attend months of training sessions, held every two weeks for 90 minutes at a time.
“We start students pretty much from scratch, teaching the inverted pyramid, interviewing, note-taking, photography and the difference between hard news and feature stories,” says Coviello, who conducts almost all of the training himself.
One of the first Ogden papers to model a youth section after Page One is The Parkersburg (W.Va.) News. Publisher Mike Christman says one of the key lessons he has learned from Coviello is the importance of properly laying the groundwork.
“If you push through that initial setup phase, then it’s more massaging and managing,” says Christman, noting the need to recruit and train would-be student journalists.
However, one of the biggest challenges of adding a teen section, particularly for a small-market paper, Christman says, is finding the available space.
“We are looking at how to shift content around to give added value to readers – we don’t want to pull anything away,” he says.
Although there is neither a formal mandate for any of Ogden’s newspapers to develop youth sections, nor model them after the Tribune Chronicle’s, there’s little question the newspaper in Warren is doing something right.
Sue Shafer, the Tribune Chronicle’s educational services manager, says NIE circulation shot up 54 percent after Coviello and student journalists revamped Page One’s content five years ago.
In January, the paper built on Page One’s popularity by launching The Zone, a weekly section aimed at 18-to-34-year-olds.
This article is reprinted with permission from the December 2005 issue of PRESSTIME, the magazine of the Newspaper Association of America. The NAA Foundation offers a free, detailed “Getting Started” handbook to help newspapers develop youth sections. For information, contact Sandy Woodcock at woods@naa.org or (703) 902-1732.
