Kate Zambreno

It's been a year since the launch of the two daily youth tabloids in Chicago, since we heard apocalyptic media critics and business reporters announcing "The Reds are coming! The Reds are coming!"

And still, a year later, both the Chicago Tribune-owned RedEye and the competing Chicago Sun-Times-owned Red Streak remain lumped together in the local vernacular as the "red papers." Red scare or revolution, smoke or fire, it is still too soon to tell, but everyone, from analysts to critics, is closely watching these kid brothers to try to see what this means for the future of the industry. Are these papers with their tabloid format, bite-size stories and flashier graphics a last-ditch attempt to salvage readers bleeding to other forms of media or, at worst, a strategy that will accelerate the decline and dumbing down of the core daily newspapers themselves?

"Apparently you young readers are highly coveted by advertisers (which in the newspaper biz makes you sexier than J. Lo), but you don't read traditional newspapers whose circulations are consequently shrinking. This is causing us severe gastrointestinal distress, guys. Come on. We want you. We need you. Without you, we'll be eating dog food in the retirement trailer park." -- Trib columnist Mary Schmich in October 6, 2002 column entitled, "If you're 18-34, you're truly old enough to read"

The newspaper business has been in a Chicken Little state as readership of daily newspapers has steadily declined over the past sixty years, especially among the coveted 18-34-year-old demographic. Mary Nesbitt, a director at the Media Management Center at Northwestern University who studies newspapers, uses the "read yesterday measure." According to her data, 54 percent of the adult population read a newspaper yesterday, unlike 39 percent of 18-24-year-olds. For both statistics, the percentage increases by ten percent on Sundays. So "it's not that they don't read the local daily newspaper, it's that compared to previous generations, they don't read at the same level," she says. It's popular to blame this on a faster-paced lifestyle, one where people don't have time to read a full-service newspaper. Especially that "young urban commuter" perpetually on the go. "I wonder if there are some days where you really only have a limited amount of time and is the big fifty-cent Tribune the best way to use that fifteen minutes you have?" asks RedEye editor Joe Knowles.

And we have many more media choices today. "People just have this sort of stuck idea that this is a business model that's not supposed to change," says Deborah Douglas, the deputy features editor at the Sun-Times and editor of Red Streak. "The problem is, we haven't been changing at the rate we should have been changing to appeal to a new generation of readers. It's about time that we have. And so, thank God, the Tribune did something to sort of force newspapers around the country to take a look at this and say, hey, we're losing our readers to other forms of media. We've had our heads in the sand for a long time."

The presumption behind RedEye was to find a way to strengthen the daily habit, says Owen Youngman, vice president of development for the Chicago Tribune who was behind this project, and has also worked to develop other youth initiatives within the paper, such as the Sunday section Q, which launched two months before the Reds. "Okay, we've got all these people who are reading, but only occasionally," he says. "Can we motivate them to read more?"

A core belief, if not a necessarily stated one, behind the Red experiment, is that the sought-after audience was fundamentally different than traditional newspaper readers due to its age. But is some particular alchemy at work with young adults that makes them newspaper-averse? "It's not because they're young," says Jane Levine, publisher of the Chicago Reader. "It's just because, by coincidence of history, when they were 15 or 25 or whatever, they had other options. The people who are 60, when they were 15 or 25, they had no other options. The only place to get the news was the daily newspaper."

"You've got 20 minutes of down time a day--riding the train to work, idling away the moments between classes, standing in life for coffee. Option A: Stare mindlessly into space. Option B: Get informed, be entertained, move on. Choose Option B and we've got what you need: RedEye." --promotional materials for RedEye

The Tribune's plan was to craft and package a product that would go after readers with an aggressive marketing and sampling campaign, similar to way dailies already market to students on college campuses. Enter the Sun-Times to ruin all of the Tribune's fun. The rival's parent company, Hollinger International, Inc., in response to a perceived threat to the Sun-Times' tabloid readership, decided to create a spoiler product that would debut simultaneously with RedEye, in order to confuse the marketplace. Media pundits smelled a good old-fashioned newspaper war. From the first day the paper hit the streets and hawkers were in tandem yelling "Get your Red paper!", the Sun-Times succeeded in confusing the masses. "Yeah, I think people are confused," says Red Streak editor Douglas. "They call it the 'Red Something,' or they all call it RedEye, to be honest," she laughs. "Even if they have your paper in their hands. And that's the function of RedEye having such a huge advertising budget." The stage was set for war, and over the past year a competition has developed like two girls wearing the same dress to school--every day for an entire year.

"We feel like we were here first," says RedEye editor Knowles. "They obviously--and have said this much--they're basically in this business to confuse the reader, and they're only here as long as we're going to be here." "At the Tribune there's at least some sort of high thought behind RedEye," says Jeremy Mullman of Crain's Chicago Business. "They thought about why they wanted to do it, they're trying to address a very specific problem. Red Streak's not that noble."

But on the editorial side, the claim that each paper has the key to what young readers want makes for some heated conversation. "It is a battle," says Douglas. "And if you read Joe Knowles' editorial last week on the 30th, all he did was compare and contrast himself to us, and I feel like if I were him, I wouldn't even acknowledge our presence, especially given all the resources and the fact that he works for such a corporate behemoth. He wrote a whole column celebrating their one-year anniversary talking about how we're such a thorn in his side. I don't see how they can say that we don't even rate because we are clearly getting under his skin."

"Whaddya think of Redeye? A. It's off the hizzle fa shizzle! B. I'm down. It's cool... C. Eh, whatever... D. Don't get me started"-- a recent house ad for RedEye

Seriously, though. What should we think of RedEye? Both red products were dismissed as an insult to the targeted 18-34-year-old demographic, a sort of USA Today with a shamrock tattoo. Often the subject of satire, even in these pages, many groaned at the trying-too-hard attempts of these publications to speak to a demographic in its own language. The whole thing recalls the end-of-newspapers banter that greeted the onset of USA Today a couple decades back. "I didn't expect them to say this is the much-anticipated greatest thing to happen to journalism since the laptop computer," says Knowles. "I knew that it was going to get pissed on." Both editors dismiss critical reaction as the complaining of chattering heads with no sense of what's cool. "Media critics, this is not something I'd expect them to embrace," says Knowles. "They're the kind of people who would be perfectly happy sitting in a dark room alone for hours and read the New York Times. They're not exactly social creatures."

However, that does not keep Douglas from taking a similar swipe at the competition. "The Sun-Times in general knows how to have more fun," she says. "They [RedEye] sort of have this idea they're going for the sort of Lincoln Park frat boy, and there's a whole other world out there of people who are potential newspaper readers who don't fit that whole paradigm. And sometimes their efforts to try to be clever or funny just kind of fall flat, because it's not something they're used to. They're not comfortable inside their own corporate skin."

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. Nesbitt, the reading expert, also 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.

"We do cover a younger group of stars and celebrities, and probably write about stories that are more relevant to younger, urban people," says the 45-year-old Knowles. Thirty-six-year-old Douglas discusses what she sees as Red Streak's responsibility to cultivate a young reader interested in current affairs. At the beginning, the war in Iraq trumped other lighter items for the cover of Red Streak. News is still important, she says, even if it is mulched into an easier-to-digest format. "I have arguments sometimes with some of my colleagues who say, 'oh, this will be fun to put out there' versus this is something that they need to know, because it's going to help them figure out the next step in their lives or figure out the next thing they need today," Douglas says.

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 Douglas, "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." But what makes an item demographically relevant? Knowles says that he tries to keep in mind that younger people have different "points of reference" when deciding what gets more prominent play in the paper. For example, he says, when John Ritter and Johnny Cash died on the same day, if RedEye had to make that decision--which they didn't since they don't publish on the weekend--the "Three's Company" sitcom star would have been more cover-worthy. "Now is Johnny Cash more important to the world at large? Probably," he says. "But John Ritter meant more to the younger readers, or the readers I think that we'd be trying to reach because he's the star of a current show. A lot of these people wouldn't have known Johnny Cash if he didn't remake a Nine Inch Nails song."

But earlier in the same interview, Knowles stated that RedEye is for every consumer, and that although the initial thought was to be "youth-oriented," he adds that "I also think that the reader of RedEye is not just an 18-34-year-old. It's just meant to be a quicker, lighter look at the news and to give you a little entertainment along the way, a little bit of sports. It's only forty-odd pages, it's not meant to be your only source of information but if that's all you had to read on a given day at least you'd feel like you could contribute to the conversation, you'd have a basic understanding of what was going on in the world."

The Tribune and the Sun-Times speak in terms of cultivating a relationship with the reader, and further distinguishing themselves from each other. The Tribune checks in with their demographic through reader panels and surveys, says Knowles and Youngman, and they have adjusted to feedback by taking away sections like the horoscope and adding more local stories produced by a growing staff of reporters. "We want to be a real newspaper that writes about local things at least, the things we can cover, that we want to be able to put our own stamp on them," says Knowles. "We're not going to have a Baghdad bureau anytime soon, but we are going to try to cover Chicago as best as we can." Douglas also points to the many young voices within Red Streak, and their Controversy section, which publishes editorials from around the country.

But has this yearlong push been successful? Are people who don't usually read newspapers reading the Reds? Are young people reading the Reds? "People do read it," says Reader publisher Levine. "I take the El to work, and I see people reading it on the El. But the other thing I see on the El, which nobody talks about, I see people reading books. I see young people reading serious books. And everybody says young people don't read, which is why we have to write these stories that are four inches long."

"What makes RedEye unique, however, is that we have a personality of our own. We aren't borrowing someone else's. And if we can't be the only 'red' paper in town, we'll settle for being the first and, in our not-so-humble opinion, the best."

--From Joe Knowle's column in the anniversary issue of RedEye

The decision by the Tribune Company to aggressively attempt to reverse the declining readership among Generation Y catalyzed a new industry zeitgeist. In a seeming chain reaction, a new set of publications aimed at luring in the MTV set has sprung up all over the country. Media conglomerate Gannett, publisher of USA Today, rolled out more "faux alternative weeklies," and the Tribune, apparently confident in the success of its homegrown product, recently invested in the launch of amNew York, a free daily targeted at young Manhattan commuters.

To be fair, the original model was not the Trib's but that of Metro, the free daily distributed throughout much of Europe whose entry into Philadelphia and Boston allegedly spooked the Tribune Company into going forward with RedEye. But the difference between the business models of all these other commuter rags and the Chicago version is that RedEye was originally conceived as a paid product, available for twenty-five cents on weekdays, half the price of the full-service paper. But will they pay for it? So far, the answer is no. Two weeks ago, the Tribune, in a story in its business section, finally acknowledged what everyone pretty much suspected from street observations. People are not buying it. According to the Tribune story, only about 15 percent of its 80,000 daily circulation is paid. "They had told me on background for a story I had done months ago that it was like 60 percent or something," says Mullman. "Fifteen percent, that's a disaster, that's not a good number." A more recent story in the Trib suggests that the figures might be far worse, that, according to its ABC audit, only 9,000 copies of RedEye are being sold. That's roughly 11 percent. "Clearly no one's paying for it. They've basically come clean on that," says Mullman. "That's got to be a concern going forward."

So even if the Tribune succeeds in strengthening the habit of daily readership but these readers aren't willing to pay for it, is that a success? Is it all smoke and mirrors sustaining the Reds, the emperor's new paper so to speak? "The whole thesis of this thing was they thought they had the format that would be the magic key to this big problem," says Mullman.

The Tribune's Youngman isn't ready to acknowledge that the paid model isn't working, even though the Chicago Reds are the only such tabloids in any market that aren't giveaways. Youngman compares just giving it away for free to a similar business model for the Internet in the nineties, a model that ultimately failed. "And frankly we didn't want to automatically start giving away our valuable content for nothing the way we wound up doing on the Internet because of the competitive set," he says. Youngman says that projected plans in the future will be to steadily increase the percentage paid. Could he have predicted a year ago that the Trib would still be giving the paper away for free? "Oh, sure," he says. "In fact, the business model and the spreadsheets have substantial numbers of sample copies going out many years in the future."

As reported in the Tribune Company's mid-year Wall Street review, proprietary Gallup research commissioned by the Tribune (which they won't release to the press) states that the average RedEye reader is 30 years old with an annual income of $63,000. Youngman gives more data to assert that RedEye has been a success. "We've expanded our reach by hundreds of thousands of people. On an given day, RedEye is the number four or five vehicle in the market for reaching consumers of any kind," he claims. Youngman also points to the 250 new advertisers he says the Tribune has brought in who have never advertised in the main paper before as an indicator of success. Mullman agrees. "The advertisers that I talk to seem to like it. However, the basic premise of RedEye was that people would be willing to pay for it."

The endgame of Tribune Lite is not only to educate young consumers to read a paper and develop a daily habit, but to someday buy the paper as well. The question is, if RedEye is successful, will these readers turn into Tribune readers or will the entire effort turn on itself? The same article that outed the low percentage of paid circulation also revealed reports of cannibalizing of single-copy sales from the Sun-Times, meaning the new paper ate into paid circulation, which leads one to presume that's the same for the Tribune's RedEye. "They'll never admit that. I'm sure it's true," says Mullman. "It almost has to. How many people read two papers every morning?" That could happen, says Youngman, who doesn't believe that RedEye will be ultimately dangerous to the core product. "We think it will wind up being a second purchase for many," he says. "One on the way in, one on the way out." The presumption is that RedEye readers will graduate into buying the Tribune. "I think that's the idea. That's the ultimate hope," says Knowles. "I don't know if we'd be disappointed if they just read RedEye forever. I mean, at least they're reading something, you know."

The question that hasn't been answered is, how much red will seep into the dailies? That is, if these youth tabloids are successful, will the parent papers reflect that aesthetic? Will the Tribune turn itself red? "We may be training people to only want the kind of information that RedEye gives them, and I guess we won't really know the answer to that for a long time," says Knowles.

But for now, RedEye is meant to build eventual Tribune readership. "The idea being that if you start reading a paper of some kind you'll grow into it as you become a voter and a homeowner and a parent and all those other kinds of things," continues Knowles. Some disagree. "I don't buy this thing that when these people start buying houses and having babies they're going to start reading the Tribune," says Levine. But, she says, and analysts have agreed, if that's what the Tribune's aiming for, then it's worth what to the media giant is chump change. "They have awfully deep pockets over there at the Trib," she says. "If they're looking at the whole thing--and I don't think they should be--but if they're looking at the whole thing as building eventual Tribune readers, that's worth spending a lot of money."

Mullman agrees that the goal is worthy of experimentation. Although circulation seems like a nightmare now, with stacks and stacks of the papers throughout the city laying around at the end of the day, ultimately the Tribune wants to remedy what is a real problem for the entire industry, the perceived unstoppable death march of newspapers. "I think they're willing to use it as a kind of laboratory and see what works. They own a lot of newspapers and it's in their interest to solve this problem. I think they're willing to spend a couple million bucks."

(2003-11-05)

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