youth

Awhile back a team of Rich Gordon's whiz kids from Northwestern University worked with Davenport's Quad-City Times on a combo print-online youth product called Your Mom.

Last year the paper pulled the plug on the printed product but kept the website. Now Will Sullivan notes that the Lee Enterprises newspaper has killed Your Mom online as well.

I have no inside information about Your Mom's numbers, but I do know one thing: Newspapers have a terrible track record at addressing the youth market and an equally terrible track record on innovation. It's the latter that I want to address here.

It's imperative that newspapers get inside the heads and hearts of young people, learn to understand them, and learn to build tomorrow's business around their needs and interests.

But in the culture and business context of a daily newspaper, a project like Your Mom is a distraction at best and a resource-sucking black hole at worst.

Who wants to advertise to these kids? Are those advertisers bad credit risks? How much will it cost us to call on them? From the ad salesperson's perspective: Will I get enough commission from this sales call to make it worth my time?

The guys from Innosight often advise us to separate innovative projects from the mothership. And they have a simple prescription: Be patient for scale, but impatient for profit. You need to discover whether a project makes business sense (i.e., can generate some sort of a profit) before you try to make it big.

Inside a newspaper, though, the drive is to make it big first, and hope for profit later. This can lead to big mistakes. A mistake is not always a bad thing, but you learn most quickly (with the least suffering) from a series of small mistakes.

It would be unreasonable to expect a team of Rich Gordon's college students to pull a perfect product out of a hat.

The issue for Lee Enterprises is not the success or failure of Your Mom, but rather what steps it takes next. Did it learn from Your Mom? How will it adapt to those learnings and try again? Because the generational dropoff in readership isn't going away.

This spring's graduating class will be part of America's first generation to be forever connected. The story of America is largely one of individual and family migration, and the end of the school experience often was the end of relationships for many as they moved away for jobs and new lives.

Today's young people are different from their elders in many ways, and one big difference is how they connect. Most interpersonal communications among today's youth are no longer face-to-face encounters, but rather mediated through technology -- instant messaging, SMS text messaging, and that old teenage favorite, the telephone. Often it's through all of them simultaneously. And, significantly, these technologies now are generally flat-rate services, insensitive to distance.

Move away? What's "away" mean these days?

The Web's new public and personal spaces help re-establish dropped connections. Myspace.com, for example, makes it easy for high-school friends to link back up through its social networking (friends lists) and search features.

This connectivity has implications for the concept of "local," which is the one remaining strength in a local newspaper's franchise.

We should keep in mind that this is a human phenomenon, not a technology phenomenon. The connectivity that's been established by the Internet will have wide-reaching social implications. Some 15,000 Los Angeles high school students took to the streets Monday to protest anti-immigrant legislation. Conversations on Myspace.com are being credited with helping spread the word.

Pretty much every conventional U.S. daily newspaper published east of the Rocky Mountains has egg on its face this morning. So do some in the west. Contrary to what you may have found rolled up in your driveway this morning, 12 miners were not found alive in Tallmansville, W. Va. Between the time the presses rolled and the time the papers were delivered, the story took a tragic turn.

This isn't a new problem; I wrestled with it for years as a daily newspaper wire editor. But the world has moved on, and newspapers have not.

Most are still pretending to be the primary connector of a news-hungry population with the outside world. Most still think of themselves as gatekeepers. Most are still stuck on the idea of a "newspaper of record" -- if we don't write about it, it didn't really happen. Meanwhile, most Americans have switched from newspapers to television, 24-hour cable news, and the Internet for breaking news, especially disaster coverage.

It's time to sunset the 20th century. It's been over for five years now.

In the Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the West said: "These things must be done delicately, or you hurt the spell." Most newspaper journalists believe that; there's a deep-seated fear of alienating "our loyal readers" by making radical changes.

I'm not afraid of that. "Our loyal readers" aren't going anywhere, except inevitably to the grave.

I'm afraid of something else: never succeeding with an entire generation that has grown up in a digital universe where everything is connected, where everything is everywhere, where technology has broken the barriers of time and space. A universe where what you know is held not necessarily in your brain, but behind a Google query. A universe where everyone is a publisher and no one has to depend on outdated information thrown into the driveway from a delivery truck.

This should be a wake-up call to every newspaper editor. Get your key staff members in a room with a whiteboard. Write down the six things your newspaper can do really well. Then compare that list with what's really in your newspaper. I'll bet you'll find a big disconnect.