CULTURE
Stop the Presses!
By Scott Jacobs
Our top story this week comes out of Winnebago, Illinois where – stop the presses – Grant doesn’t like Amanda anymore.
Only last week, “Grant Likes Amanda” was headline news in the Seward Street Neighborhood News, sharing top billing with Taylor getting her driver’s license and “Baseball is Blooming.” But life changes fast when you are 10 years old and the whole world is wherever you can get to on your bicycle. So my advice to Grant and Amanda is get over it – and go grab your mitts.
The Neighborhood News is a collaborative attempt by six kids, ages 8 to 12, to keep track of the hot news in Winnebago. I found myself drawn to it not only because some of them are my niece and nephew, but because the kids are coping with the same problem plaguing all the metropolitan dailies: how to appeal to a younger demographic?
The Chicago Sun-Times is the latest big city daily to redesign for a younger audience. It has done so by refocusing its content on neighborhood stories and adopting other innovations from The Neighborhood News -- like more white space, snappier and shorter stories, and hip columnists who come with full-figured promo shots and invite more interaction from readers.
The
model in The Neighborhood News is Morgann, 12, whose gossip column
gets right to what’s on the younger reader’s mind:
* Morgann and her boyfriends’ anniversary
is April 3rd.
* John picks his nose.
* Britney Spears is out of rehab.
* And Myles broke up with Katelyn.
DO U HAVE GOSSIP?
Well if u do, TELL ME.
Put it in my mailbox or just TELL ME!
Morgann also writes an “Ask Morgann” advice column. One recent entry:
Dear Morgann,
My sister and I are fighting all the time. She is getting annoying. When I
hit her, she always hits me back. Harder! What should I do?
From Tired of Fighting
Dear Tired:
What to do is tell your sister she’s getting annoying! Stop hitting
her. And tell your mother if she keeps getting annoying.
Another way The Sun-Times and Seward Street Neighborhood News mirror each other is in the prominence of sports on the front page. Next to Lucy's report that Great Grandma Spellman died is a cover story on the opening of baseball season. It is written in the best Jay Mariotti style, complaining, of course, that “we have been trying to play baseball, but every time we try the ground is too muddy or we don’t have enough players.”
As you might expect, The Neighborhood News is heavy
on comics, jokes and 
interactive
quizzes (“What’s Your Favorite Animal?") It hasn’t
gone as far as The Sun-Times in offering downloadable Sudoku puzzles
in a special afternoon e-edition, but the editors do note that John won a
brand new Xbox 360 and everyone is invited to come over and play after school.
What’s remarkable to me is that this effort is coming from a post-Internet generation, children who can’t remember a time when you could not watch video on the net, build social networks in MySpace, research school papers online or instant message your friends by computer and cell phone.
The good news for the newspaper industry is that the instinct to write and report about the major events in our world is alive and well in Winnebago. The bad news for the kids is that when they grow up and advance in their journalistic careers, they may find themselves trapped in the perpetual adolescence of newspapers written for the attention span of a 12-year-old.
