Getting Kids Into News

Like many urban newspapers, the Toronto Star has just launched a new youth-oriented newspaper aimed at kids age 9 to 14. The concept seems to be to catch them early and build brand dependence. It’s not a new idea. The Chicago Tribune has a section called Kidnews and London’s Sunday Times has introduced Funday Times. In a number of urban centres newspapers have had some success targetting a slightly older audience, Toronto has the tabloid Now and in London, Associated Newspapers launched Metro in 1999. But it’s probably all too little to late.

The motivation behind this innovation is declining revenue and readership for traditional newspapers. The Economist reports in the March 5th edition that all over Europe newspaper circulation is down. Circulation was substantially off at every one of the broadsheets in the UK during the second half of 2002 compared to a year earlier. Since 1990 a National Readership Survey suggests that readership has dropped by a fifth. In North America, about 55.4 % of the population read a daily newspaper in 2002 compared to 62.4 % in 1990.

The biggest factor in the declining numbers seems to be young people. They are just not buying in. In Britain, the number of readers under the age of 24 has shrunk by over a third since 1990. In North America young adults account for less than 1% of readership. Young people everywhere are getting their news either online, or from television or radio or by “news-grazing” in snatches throughout the day rather than sitting down to read a paper. They catch the news in elevators or stuck in traffic jams listening to the radio, or even on blackberries or palm pilots. Everyone, it seems, is multi-tasking the news.

As readership declines, advertising revenues fall too. Marketers are looking for newer more effective ways to deliver their messages. Competition for “eyeballs” is fierce. Today, any strategy targeting kids has to have a component that includes online messaging as well as “guerilla” tactics that reach them where they play. And even the newspaper magnates have figured out that hard news doesn’t sell. You’d better have some whimsy or entertainment value if you want to send a message to youth. And “street” language and online shorthand must be part of the equation. Using a traditional model and fluffing up the content will never work. No point in closing a gate when they’ve off in a virtual world.