NEWS FOR THE NEXT GENERATION
Give the Kid a Burger
Tribune's RedEye gets crushed by critics, but editors still believe a McNews diet will win young readers' hearts
On a Wednesday afternoon in November Joe Knowles, the forty-four-year-old co-editor of RedEye, the Chicago Tribune's new youth-targeted tabloid, settled in behind a conference-room table on the fourth floor of the Tribune Tower on Michigan Avenue. Behind him, plastered to one bright red wall, were the first eighteen issues of the paper, each blaring a noisy front-page headline — payback, message from a cave, bush to saddam: time's up. All fourteen members of the bare-bones staff — reporters, editors, and graphics people — filed into the room. It was 3 p.m. and the first editorial meeting of the day was about to begin.
Three weeks earlier, on October 30, RedEye, and the Sun-Times's competing salvo, Red Streak, had hit the windy city promising to rope the elusive and highly coveted eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old demographic into the newspaper reading family. The emergence of two dailies devoted to the MTV generation seemed like the start of nothing short of a newspaper revolution. So far, though, the papers have been roughed up by critics. They have been called "condescending," "amazingly superficial," and have spawned a parody site, Red Face. Some readers have demanded their quarters back.
Inside RedEye's offices, at least, the staff seems unfazed by the harsh reception. (Red Streak editors declined my request to visit.) The pace is so relaxed and low-key that it's hard to believe this is a startup, let alone one embroiled in what The Wall Street Journal called an "old-fashioned newspaper street brawl."
"All right, let's go over the news of the day," Knowles began.
Lara Weber, the soft-spoken news editor (or "news finder" in RedEye-speak), piped up. "Here's an interesting story," she said. At thirty-five, Weber is one of the staff's oldest members. "Not very many people in the eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old bracket can find much of anything on a map." She read aloud from wire service copy. "One in ten young Americans cannot locate his own country on a blank map of the world."
"I almost find that hard to believe," Knowles said.
"Only one in seven can find Iraq," Weber said.
A young woman chimed in from across the table. "The only
country that scored worse was Mexico."
"Where's that?" joked another editor.
An earnest discussion about the merits of the story followed and a consensus was reached: this amusing and alarming bit of news deserved good play in the paper, perhaps even the front page.
At RedEye, the big news of the day does not necessarily drive the editorial agenda. It's the perceived "demographic" relevance that matters. The simple formula for reaching younger readers, the Tribune concluded last summer after months of focus groups and market research, was to offer a sort of newspaper lite — a snappy tabloid filled with shorter news pieces and extra sports and entertainment. Younger people are interested in news, the theory goes, they just don't want to spend time reading.
"Why does a newspaper have to be one-size-fits-all?" Knowles asked me one afternoon. "We're trying to tailor a news product that we think people will have time for — ten or fifteen minutes on the ‘El' . . . . I think there are a lot of people who'd like to read a daily newspaper if they felt they could get through it."
With only two reporters on staff and a handful of free-lance columnists, the vast majority of RedEye's content is generated elsewhere. The editors take what's handed to them, and then refashion it to fit into the paper's quick-read format. They spend their afternoons combing the wires and other news sources such as Salon and Slate — the same venues relied upon over at Red Streak. And, though they have the Tribune's entire editorial content at their disposal, not much of the parent paper actually makes it onto RedEye's pages. The Tribune skews middle-aged.
Thus, RedEye may be one of the least ambitious newspaper startups in history. Even the design cribs liberally from other publications. The sleek, photoshopped pages are filled with wisecracking tidbits (a news limerick, a quick hit about George Clooney's bare bottom) and snarky graphics-driven boxes — the kinds of things that fuel the front sections of the lad mags, minus the cleavage.
But RedEye's news pages are pretty straightforward, a sort of Headline News in red, white, and black. Early tabloid headlines — that bites for a West Nile story — were scrapped. "What we heard from people was they don't want the news presented in a less than serious way," explained Knowles. "We didn't want people to think this was a pretend newspaper. They want it segmented. They don't want J. Lo in the news pages."
The most important RedEye feature is the big cover story that every morning dominates the front page. As with any tabloid, the cover is the major decision of the 3 p.m. meeting. On this afternoon, the potential cover subjects included the cliffhanger conclusion of The Bachelor, research into a new STD vaccine, the Breeders' Cup bet-rigging scandal, and the young American geography deficit.
"I think you just put a map on the front and say ‘you are here,'" suggested sports editor Mike Kellams, one of several Tribune transplants on staff.
"Hello!" Knowles proposed, chuckling. "Welcome to home."
Jane Hirt, the thirty-five-year-old former Tribune foreign news editor who shares the top spot with Knowles, swiveled in her chair. "Wait," she said. "Let's hear from an eighteen-to-twenty-four. Leo, how do you feel about that?"
Leo Ebersole, a goateed twenty-two-year-old editing assistant, is the youngest person on staff. He had been leaning against the far wall. "Well, if there's a better story . . .," he suggested, trailing off.
"I like betting," said Cara DiPasquale, the twenty-seven-year-old features editor, who is three years out of journalism school. "It's a good story — you know, beating the system."
The next morning RedEye's cover line screamed how track hackers blew a sure thing, leading into a clipped Tribune Wire Services story on the horse racing scandal. Sometime before the paper had gone to bed — around 1 a.m. — that headline had been chosen from among the suggestions e-mailed to Knowles. A box below the cover story led to a back-page Bachelor blurb. Inside, on page three, a blurred full-color globe handled the geography story under the headline it's all a blur.
Meanwhile the competing paper, Red Streak, slapped four different stories on its front page that day, including the geography survey and the final outcome of The Bachelor. At Red Streak — a copycat product hustled together to jab a finger in the Tribune's eye — there's less attention paid to front-page grabbers, but the formula is essentially the same.
The twenty-five-cent RedEye is on sale at 1,100 locations around the city, but since day one, it has been distributed free by hawkers dispatched to the city's subway platforms and street corners. The idea is to use the freebies to create awareness. Each day, about 100,000 of the 120,000 copies printed are either sold or given away.
Late on the morning of November 21, with frigid rain spattering the pavement a few blocks from the Tribune Tower, a RedEye hawker cowered against a wall as the rain soaked through the plastic into the big pile of newspapers that sat idly beside her. The empty red metal box nearby — stamped Red Streak — may never have been filled. Later that afternoon, at another RedEye meeting, Bob Davis, the paper's gray-haired senior adviser, announced that he was leaving.
"I think about thirty-two years ago I wrote the very first perspective section," said Davis, the Tribune's former metro editor, who returned from retirement to spend a month aiding the launch. "They said it would never last and you can still find it every Sunday. And I also wrote the very first Trib Facts section, and they said it would never last. And it didn't." He paused and soaked up the laughter.
After the meeting I asked Davis why he thought media critics
had been so hard on the Chicago startups. "It's de rigueur
for professionals to piss on something like this," he said.
"While the critics are pissing on it their bosses are calling
up — ‘How's it doing, what're you doing?'
It's like a McDonald's hamburger. I mean who's
kidding who? It's a quarter. If you want a gourmet meal you
go to Charlie Trotter's. If you want a burger on the fly
you buy this thing. We're not any Châteaubriand. We're
a burger. That's what it is. Once you acknowledge that, we're
not saying we're anything we're not.
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