Get Them While They're Younger!
By James H. Burnett III
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

St. Petersburg, Fla. Sept. 18 -- For years, some variation of “Get them while they’re young” has been a rallying cry for those fighting to preserve a popular practice. But before outfits like the Manatee Messenger came along, fighting to save the newspaper industry meant getting ‘em only as young as their late teens to mid- 20s.

The Messenger is getting them even younger. The staff of the Messenger is composed of 10- and 11-year-old students in the Center for Communication and Mass Media at Melrose Elementary School in St. Petersburg, Fla.

Melrose is a magnet school in one of St. Pete’s poorest neighborhoods. And the magnet? Well, that’s the newspaper written and edited by students, for students, with the guidance of St. Pete Times staffers.

And whether the story is an editorial on why boys should not wear their baggy pants too low on their waists or how a popular teacher was beaned with a rock by delinquents near Melrose, these kids take their journalism seriously.

For Messenger reporter and 5th-grader Linda Nohn, the key to creating lifelong newspaper readers is simple.

“They just need to have more stories about the common person, the people in the community, and put them in parts of the paper where other people who are reading can get to know them,” Nohn said of daily newspapers at the annual conference of the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors in St. Petersburg.

During a lunchtime speech Friday, Dorothy B. Gilliam, recently retired director of the Washington Post’s Young Journalism Development Project, seized on the theme of grooming newspaper readers early in life with a description of the project and how it has turned a number of Washington D.C. area teens into news writers and readers.

The program teams Post newsroom employees, from reporters to editors and designers, with high school student newspaper staffs.

“In the coming years, this population will rival in size the baby boom generation,” Gilliam said.

The best way to get those teens to read daily newspapers and to participate in their production is “to help them publish their own high school newspapers,” she added.

To Shawn Ohler, editor of the Edmonton (Alberta) Journal’s Ed magazine, cultivating “young” readers means going after that slightly older set of young people.

Ohler won’t hesitate to send his reporters on a pub crawl dressed in Santa suits, on a hunt for people wearing trucker hats or to a kayaking contest to write not about the boating but about the corporate sponsors instead.

And at first glance, none of those stories have anything in common. But if you believe the 32-year-old Ohler, in a day and age when traditional newspapers are shedding readers like weight, all those stories contain the two ingredients to successfully rope in new young readers.

“They were sharply focused features on really interesting people,” he explained. “And that is important. We do need younger readers. Every paper does, but in terms of subjects, being young is not enough. If they happen to be young, that’s a bonus.”

Ohler said that when his paper launched Ed, which replaced a Saturday lifestyle section, in early 2000, they knew from talking to 18- to 34-year-olds that they needed to regularly present traditional youth-news staples, like music and nightlife coverage, in “new and interesting ways.”

When his staff noticed a pattern of punk rock bands, known for their anti-establishment themes, performing at the West Edmonton Mall – the largest shopping mall in the world and arguably a symbol of corporate wealth – Ohler assigned a story about what that contradiction said about the state of the local punk rock scene.

And when Edmonton got its first electronic-clash music nightclub, an Ed writer explored why it was that Edmonton was just getting around to such a place when the genre had all but died out two years earlier in its pillar cities of London, England, and New York.

“We tend to leave reviews of local shows, or previews of coming bands to the alt. weeklies or the entertainment section of our own paper,” he explained. “In Ed, our goal is to probe the incongruities of a subject that’s been written about the same way over and over.”

Reader feedback and Journal research has shown that Ed’s young readers don’t want short, choppy, news briefs on topics they likely already learned by word-of-mouth or Web surfing, Ohler said.

On the contrary, based on the Journal’s 15 percent readership jump last year – some of which can no doubt be attributed to Ed’s success, Ohler said, young readers want narrative features and investigative pieces too… but on topics relevant to their age group.

The bottom line, he said, is “If you treat young readers like idiots, they’ll pay you back by ignoring you.”

James H. Burnett III, a 2003 AASFE convention fellow, is a features general assignment reporter at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it .