NEWS FOR THE NEXT GENERATION
Imagine
Sixty-Seven Young Journalists and the Newspaper of Their Dreams
1. What is This?
This is not a blueprint for the newspaper of tomorrow. This does not offer a neat, complete answer to the question, What would it take to get the kids to read the paper? (Dream on). This does not represent the desires or demands of a generation of readers — Gen X, Y, or otherwise. Our sources for this story, young newspaper journalists all, are admittedly more focused on — and likely more interested in — news and newspapering than the average twenty-something.
So what is this? This is a loose description of The Dream Newspaper, as imagined by young journalists from around the country. As part of the continuing discussion of (or fixation on) what young people want to read and why, we sought journalists ages thirty and under to talk about the kind of newspaper they would like to read — and work for — and to report back to us with their ideas.
Our recruitment drive was surprisingly simple. We asked editors and reporters to recommend and help rally participants from among the thoughtful, young journalists in their newsrooms. Within days, we were flooded with volunteers. The quantity and enthusiasm of the responses were encouraging — a good omen, perhaps, for the future of newspapering. In the end, we enlisted thirteen groups, ranging in size from three to eight people, and representing eighteen newspapers, from The Oregonian to The Philadelphia Inquirer, from City Pages (Minneapolis) to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
We did not present our groups with a checklist of topics or require them to come to consensus. We simply asked them to get together — preferably out of the office — and discuss how their Dream Newspaper would look, read, and be delivered. Each group was to send us a report and await our follow-up questions. Each was also to imagine itself unbound by convention or costs, beats or bosses. Fantasy was encouraged.
So, from the Elvis Room at Mama's Mexican Kitchen in Seattle to the Cambridge Common bar and restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, over half-priced beers on Chicago's north side and store-bought snacks in Tucson, our Dream Teams convened. And this is what they told us.
2. Fairly Grounded
Choose your cliché. None of our groups threw the baby out with the bath water. They rocked the boat, but they did not abandon ship. As the reports rolled in, it became clear that The Dream Newspaper would be different from today's average newspaper in several distinct but subtle ways.
The Dream Newspaper would look familiar: tabloid format, with sections for metro, sports, business, and so on. Most of our Dreamers report, edit, design, or take photographs for the print versions of their newspapers, and none were eager to dream themselves out of a job. So, the online version of The Dream Newspaper would exist to supplement — not supplant — the physical paper. There were several references in our Dream Teams' reports to timeworn newspapering gripes. There were calls to abandon the inverted pyramid, for instance, and pay staffers more ("double the base"). There were appeals for less wire copy, more flexible work hours ("consider four, ten-hour days"), and continuing training ("weekly sessions for the entire newsroom explaining the basics of tax law," for example). Much of what came out of these conversations could be characterized as an overarching desire for "better journalism" — more pounding the pavement, more questioning of authority, and more diversity in sources and staffing.
There were a few "radical" proposals. Some groups' Dream Newspaper would be free. One wouldn't have to publish on days when nothing newsworthy happened. There were a few calls to kill the editorial page ("newspapers are owned by large companies now and large companies don't have souls or opinions"). There would be a gym and a coffee shop in the office, with a bar conveniently across the street. One group sought to institute Casual Sex Fridays, as a "morale booster."
Despite our invitation to fantasize, most of the groups stayed fairly grounded in reality. As reports came in and follow-up interviews were completed, The Dream Newspaper took shape, and it bears scant resemblance to anything Red (Eye or Streak).
3. 'We Want to Connect'
Hold onto your hat. The Dream Newspaper would include more international coverage than today's average newspaper. As it turns out, the young people in our groups — far from being disengaged or self-involved, as the prevailing wisdom goes — see themselves very much as part of a global community, and they want a newspaper that reflects this.
"In the same way that we grew up with unfathomable consumer choices, we've also taken a much more international view of the world," says Lisa Heyamoto, twenty-four, a Seattle Times business reporter. "We all realize that we're part of a global system, and we want to know how we fit into that, and what the similarities and differences are between ourselves and our peers worldwide." Thanks to the Internet, and to the proliferation of college study-abroad programs and cheap airline tickets, our Dream Teams tell us, they have access to other countries and cultures in ways that their parents did not.
Alongside breaking foreign news and coverage of the secretary of state's latest trip to the Middle East, The Dream Newspaper would run stories about people, people, people. "Give us the facts and the latest, but also engage us with tales of what Iraqis our age are thinking," writes our group from The Seattle Times. "What are their fears? Do individual under-thirties hate us? And why, exactly? Give a rundown of their typical day, and how it's changed, if at all, with threats of war."
Leslie Koren, thirty, a staff writer for The Record, in northern New Jersey, sums it up this way: the Dream Newspaper would include "stories about people who could be here, but just happen to be there." Take Afghanistan. As an example of the sort of story she craves, Koren points to one that ran in The Boston Globe (written by thirty-one-year-old Patrick Healy) about local rock bands cautiously emerging after the defeat of the Taliban.
Anand Vaishnav, a twenty-seven-year-old Boston Globe education reporter, says, referring to coverage of Afghanistan, "Every now and then you get a story — weddings are now celebrated, kids are flying kites, girls are going to school. I'm interested in their lives, culture, what the place looks like. I want to smell it, feel it, and hear it."
Another way to bring a human face to foreign news, our group from the Arizona Daily Star suggests, is to pay closer attention to immigrant communities at home, and to how U.S. actions abroad resonate locally. In general, The Dream Newspaper's international coverage would be less jingoistic and less U.S.-centric than our Dreamers perceive the average newspaper to be.
Several groups cite examples of stories they say have successfully humanized international news, and might serve as models for The Dream Newspaper: an Associated Press story about poor, unarmed Nigerian women who seized control of several Chevron Texaco facilities last summer, demanding jobs; and a Newsday piece explaining the popularity of Saddam Hussein-like moustaches among men in Iraq. Kara Spak, a twenty-eight-year-old staff writer for the Daily Herald (suburban Chicago), mentions a recent Chicago Tribune series titled, "Finding Sanctuary." "They sent reporters to homes all over the place — in Belfast, a rural Indian village, Iceland," Spak says. "And they spent a couple of days with the families and did these long feature stories in the Home section. They were about the dwelling, but also about the family's life there. Each one included a picture of the toilet." The Dream Newspaper would include more stories like these. Says Lisa Heyamoto, "Being up on current events isn't a good enough reason to read the paper anymore. We want to connect, and that's why we read in the first place."
4. Attitude Adjustment
At The Dream Newspaper, worship at the altar of objectivity would be optional. "Sometimes when newspapers try to bend over backward — on the one hand, on the other hand — it ends up looking fake," says The Boston Globe's Vaishnav. "When something is just blatantly one-sided or wrong, it would be nice to point it out." And not just on the op-ed page. Reporters would be encouraged to write "first-person columns on what they've been covering — an inside look with a point of view," writes our group from The Seattle Times, pointing to their own David Postman's columns on state politics ("smart-ass, but very knowledgeable" and "popular with younger readers"). Says Vaishnav, "We talked about having political profiles that read like a Washington Post Style section piece or profiles or stories that read like a good New Yorker tale. Something where you know the point of view of the reporter, and that is okay." He cites Philip Gourevitch's recent New Yorker piece on Buddy Cianci, former mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, as a strong example. This style of reporting, several groups say, works best with politics, sports or the arts, but would be done more often at — and could be attempted anywhere in — the Dream Newspaper.
There were several calls for magazine-style, narrative pieces. "Narrative journalism brings people into stories," says S. Mitra Kalita, twenty-six, a business reporter at Newsday. "We should make stories about the Middle East so engaging, so novel-like that you can't help but read them." Our group from City Pages favors articles that "describe the hell out of" a place or a scene. "The more a writer can hang out with a band, a politician, a policeman, and experience what they're experiencing, and then paint a portrait of them, the better," says Melissa Maerz, twenty-four, a City Pages music editor. Longer, narrative pieces could be serialized, several groups suggest, like Thomas French's multi-part pieces at the St. Petersburg Times.
Writes our group from The Boston Globe, "Stories would have more style, akin to something you might see in a sophisticated magazine . . . . There should be surprising, sometimes funny, but always delightful stories on page one — at least one a day." Marvin Joseph, a twenty-six-year-old Washington Post photographer, would bring magazine-style writing to the sports section ("Sports-Illustrated-type features and profiles"), the business section ("a blend of Black Enterprise and The Wall Street Journal"), and the style section ("the flair of Vibe magazine").
The Dream Newspaper would up the flippancy factor, and embrace a conversational tone and less formal language. "Papers need to stay up past their bedtime," says Andisheh Nouraee, twenty-nine, a columnist and photographer for Creative Loafing. "They're old-fashioned, or at least perceived to be." The Dream Newspaper would "throw in the f-word every once and a while. We're a foul-mouthed generation. A paper doesn't reflect our generation if it refuses to swear." Our group from the Globe set its sights somewhat lower, requesting that the words "idiot" and "holy Jesus" be allowed in print. (But Destinee-Charisse Royal, a twenty-two-year-old Philadelphia Inquirer copy editor, calls it a "turnoff" when newspapers excessively "streetify" language.)
The Daily Herald's Kara Spak wants a tongue-in-cheek style to infiltrate all daily coverage, unless "it's just obviously really inappropriate, like in a murder story." She says that her generation is irreverent and will make fun of just about anything. The problem, she says, is that striking the right tone is "really hard to do well." One publication that does it well, according to many of our groups, is The Onion. "The Onion provides unique news coverage because of its cynicism," writes our Atlanta group. "It just plain goes out and says, in a headline, ‘Bush On Economy: We must invade Iraq.' There's something to be said for its bluntness." The Dream Newspaper would employ some of The Onion's bite
5. The Look of It
When it comes to calibrating the mix of graphics, photographs, and text on a page, the approach at The Dream Newspaper would be, as our group from The Oregonian writes, "the most effective story-telling technique wins." Flexibility and open-mindedness would rule the day in story meetings, writes our group from The News & Observer (Raleigh), with reporters, photographers, and designers finding stories from the field and deciding together on the best format. "Could the story be told as a photo essay? Does it deserve thirty inches of text? Or just ten with a great information graphic?"
Twenty-three-year-old Kristopher Lee, whose title at The News & Observer is "visual journalist" (he creates information graphics and illustrations), recently went out with a reporter and photographer to report a story. As a result, Lee says, he was able to create a clean, simple graphic to explicate a complex, computerized clothes-sizing process. At The Dream Newspaper, this on-the-scene-reporting approach to graphics would be the norm. Ellen Sung, twenty-five, a News & Observer reporter, adds that visuals should not be treated merely as "entry points to stories" but as "part of the story." Lee cites the New York Times's science section as a model for graphics — they "take up a lot of space," but are full of information and easy to read.
There were several calls for "quick hits" on page one, with refers to the full stories inside, like The Wall Street Journal's "What's News" section. Our New York-New Jersey group came up with one example of a story that could be presented with graphics and minimal text: a box, listing the promises made by a campaigning politician and reflecting which of the promises, six months in office, have been kept and which have not. It could be a recurring item, done twice a year in an effort to hold politicians accountable. The Dream Newspaper would place more value on — and take more time with — caption-writing, says our group from The Oregonian, because "young readers are visual readers." (But it's a mistake, Sung says, to think of "our generation being unable to comprehend something if it isn't in full color with cute captions and screaming headlines.")
Creative, eye-catching drawings and paintings would be used as often as photographs to illustrate stories in The Dream Newspaper. City Pages's Melissa Maerz points to LA Weekly, which runs cover illustrations by artists like Daniel Clowes and Tony Millionaire. Says The Seattle Times's Robert Hernandez, "On the anniversary of September 11, we ran a watercolor painting of the twin towers on the front page — and nothing else. What it did was invoke a moment of silence, in print."
6. Inform, But Don't Insult
On the one hand, The Dream Newspaper would never "talk down" to its readers or "dumb down" information in a misguided attempt to reach young people. On the other hand, the paper would not assume that readers know everything — the complete history and play-by-play of events in the Middle East, for example. "We'll be the first group to say that we don't know everything about history throughout time," says Scott Ladd, twenty-eight, a sports section designer at The Lexington Herald-Leader (Kentucky). "But we want to learn. We don't want it to read like our grandparents are reading us a history book. We can smell when we're being ‘reached out' to."
How would The Dream Newspaper walk this fine line between condescension and clarification? Mike Rosenwald, a twenty-eight-year-old Boston Globe police reporter, cites as an example Slate's "Explainer" feature (written by twenty-eight-year-old Brendan I. Koerner), which has tackled queries such as, How do you become a weapons inspector?, What's the most powerful political job in China? and What is Ovaltine? "Explainer" answers such questions with solid information and a sense of humor, Rosenwald says. Hernandez, an online news producer at The Seattle Times, suggests that more stories be accompanied by a box that lays out the who, what, where, when, why, and how, educating the reader quickly and freeing the reporter to write the story "in a more engaging way," perhaps without a straight news lead. Lisa Heyamoto, the Seattle Times staffer, cites the tear-out voter's guide printed in the alternative weekly, the Stranger, as another model. "I see people bring it to the polls and vote accordingly each year," Heyamoto says. "Almost all my friends do it."
7. The Good Life on a Budget
The Dream Newspaper would be "entertainment-heavy, but not at the expense of news," writes our Chicago group, sounding a theme expressed in many of the reports. There were zero pleas for increased celebrity coverage, for more on J.Lo and Ben. "All efforts to cater to this demographic include being stupid," says Creative Loafing's Andisheh Nouraee. "Newspapers assume our generation wants nothing more than fluff, twenty-four-seven entertainment. That is flat-out wrong." Rather, The Dream Newspaper would include more examination of pop culture — or, as our City Pages group puts it, "more subversive analysis of pop culture."
Need a for-instance? Two groups cite a fall 2002, page-one New York Times piece about how humiliation is the driving force behind reality TV, and its true appeal. (Although another group thinks this story did not belong on page one and calls it an attempt to pander to their age group). Our New York-New Jersey group suggests a story on why people are so fascinated with the actress Sarah Jessica Parker's new baby.
Our Dream Teams want to know how to enrich their lives — how to spend their leisure time, decorate their small apartments or first homes, and cook or garden with minimal time, space or skill. Stories in this vein would be an important part of the Dream Newspaper, but "not to the point where the paper becomes a ‘how to' manual" or merely a vehicle for entertainment listings, writes our group from the Arizona Daily Star.
City Pages's Melissa Maerz offers this example: "Twenty-somethings have very little money as a rule. I personally love the magazine Readymade, which includes ideas on how to make your own furniture. This is more of a magazine-type feature, but I'll bet it wouldn't be out of place in a newspaper column." The Dream Newspaper would include "stories on doing things for free — like a friend of mine who does ‘dumpster diving,' and gets cool stuff for free," says Callie Lipkin, twenty-six, a free-lance photographer in Chicago. Says the group from the Lexington Herald-Leader, "If I can grow tomatoes in my apartment in a small pot, then by golly tell me how . . . . We want recipes, but remember I'm learning to cook, tell me how to make quick, microwave meals."
In addition, The Dream Newspaper would include pieces on how to manage money, get a loan, avoid debt, and handle a 401K. The Paper would cover relationships, but the stories would be about people who have just moved in together or have been married for five years, not twenty. Stories on hot-button topics like recreational drug use or sexually transmitted diseases would be written without an alarmist or finger-wagging tone.
Subcultures and alternative life-styles would be covered in detail in The Dream Newspaper. "We'd like to hear what goes on in the world of bike messengering, or at an Earth First commune, or at a fight club in suburban New Jersey, or what things are like for second-generation Somali teens in America," writes our group from City Pages. "Sometimes, we'd like to hear these stories from the subjects themselves, in their own words."
The Paper would review Web sites, 'zines, and video games, and include stories about how technology affects daily life. "I want to do a story on how most tech support at schools is done by students," says Chris Seper, twenty-nine, a technology reporter at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, "and how we lack a real understanding of how savvy" the students are.
Our New York-New Jersey group suggests a new beat, a "universal experience reporter," who would write about "things we all deal with in life" — what it feels like to get a driver's license, to be the only person in a circle of friends who is not yet married, or to be a senior citizen watching one's friends die one by one.
8. Getting Engaged
Our Dreamers are not ready to relinquish newspapers as we know them; The Online Dream Newspaper would exist to complement the physical paper. Even The Seattle Times's online news producer, Robert Hernandez, concurs. "There is nothing for me that beats sitting down with a newspaper and a cup of coffee and getting my fingers dirty," he says. Most of his nonjournalist friends also "like to hold something," he says, and prefer the "aura of authority" of the written page. The online Dream Newspaper would look and act a lot like the electronic versions of many existing daily newspapers: it would include breaking news, updates to print stories, and a wide selection of photographs, writes our group from The Oregonian, echoing the views of other groups. And subscribers to the physical newspaper could access richer content online than casual browsers.
The Dream Newspaper would use the Web to offer things that cannot be done in the paper, such as transparency in reporting. "We write the story the way we see it — our take — then give people all the hard evidence on the Web," says The Record's Leslie Koren, such as links to full-text interview transcripts and relevant public records. Writes our group from Atlanta, "If we're interested in something, we'll go online immediately to find out everything we can about a topic." The Dream Newspaper would "take advantage of this ‘hunger for information' by making it easy to do additional research — related links, deep links."
Our Dream Teams want more interaction between reporters and readers — a desire they say comes from their perspectives as both. The Online Dream Newspaper would foster this interaction by offering chats or open microphones for readers and reporters, and by giving "users a chance to speak up in online forums," writes our Atlanta group. Adrian Holovaty, a twenty-two-year-old online developer for The Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World, sees an additional way to address what he terms a "disconnect" between reporters and readers. For each community it covered, The Dream Newspaper would "produce a hyper-local, community-oriented blog," Holovaty says.
The electronic Dream Newspaper would also offer "interactive informational graphics," writes our Seattle Times group. For example, as part of its coverage of the state budget crisis, The Seattle Times offered an "online game" that let readers try their hand at balancing the state budget, given the revenue and expenses. The goal was to help readers "feel more engaged in news and help explain, in a more tangible way, the challenges lawmakers face.
9. No 'Boomer Insecurity'
At The Dream Newspaper, editors, columnists, and foreign correspondents would often be under thirty. Young staffers would be involved in decision-making processes — what to put on page one, which investigative projects to pursue — and younger sources would be included in stories. In other words, there would be "more people like us writing about us," writes our group from the Lexington Herald-Leader.
There is more than self-interest (powerful, plum positions for everyone!) behind this, our groups say. The dearth of under-thirty staffers in several areas of the newsroom, they say, contributes to inadequate and often hackneyed coverage of their age group. For instance, the Daily Herald's Kara Spak points to a recent story in the Herald about Gen-X parents "and how surprising it was that these former slackers were good parents and that they wanted to stay married."
Says The Plain Dealer's Seper, "You have a perspective in the newsroom today that is largely forty and over, and still largely male. Things that don't come from that perspective — married with kids, a homeowner, on a certain social path — they are covered as if looking into a fishbowl." As an example, he says, many newspapers cover high school in a "hey, look what the kids are doing" way, when high schools should be covered as the "little communities" that they are. Reporters "aren't as agile as they like to think at being able to crystallize others' experiences," he says.
The wait-your-turn, dues-paying tradition would have no place at The Dream Newspaper. "I've heard that the reason we don't have twenty-something or early-thirty-something columnists is because we don't have enough life experience," Seper says. "Well, I'm sorry but in all honesty that is just boomer insecurity."
10. Reality Check
Even as our Dream Teams convened, change was (and had been) afoot at several newspapers — beyond the much-publicized efforts of the two red Chicago dailies. The Lexington Herald-Leader had its own in-house "youth brainstorming team" at work when we contacted the paper to participate in this story. The Seattle Times was preparing to launch Next, a weekly two-page addition to the Sunday op-ed section devoted to (and written by) seventeen-to-twenty-five-year-olds. Moreover, thirty young Seattle Times staffers — officially dubbed the "2010 Gen Y Task Force" — will meet regularly in 2003, and go through the paper line by line and see where the holes are in terms of appealing to younger readers. The goal is to gradually publish a more youth-friendly Seattle Times.
On a more immediate time horizon, The Record's Leslie Koren recently shifted from covering the police beat to writing features "with a focus on stories for people in their twenties and early thirties," a move she had pitched to her editors. And what is fantasy for many of our groups — under-thirty foreign correspondents — is reality at The Boston Globe. Two of our Boston Dreamers, Marcella Bombardieri, twenty-five, and Farah Stockman, twenty-eight, spent six weeks each covering the war in Afghanistan. While both reporters felt they brought "fresh eyes" and few "preconceptions" to their coverage, they also say they developed a healthy respect for seasoned war correspondents.
Given the distance between The Dream Newspaper and the Real World
of Newspapering, do these Dreamers plan to tough it out long enough
to see some of their visions into being? Absolutely, say several
participants. Sure, others say, if newspapers foster a less stressful,
more family-friendly atmosphere and become more flexible with
time ("like, if you weren't going to work twelve hours
a day, only — oh my god — eight"). Dare to dream.
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