The Chicago Tribune is trying to get you, that elusive twentysomething non-reader, to stop resisting its newspaper by introducing its daily, easy-to-read-in-the-crapper tabloid called "RedEye." Actually, it should be called "Clothespin," because that appears to be what the Tribune Co. is wearing on its corporate nose as it slums to attract a perceived youth audience that is educated and moneyed, yet dumb.
After viewing the Oct. 29 "preview edition," it can be said without hesitation that there's never been a publication that had such obvious contempt for its target audience. The Tribune, in its focus groups, must have gotten the message that the 18-to-34 demographic is cynical about the news; so, in return, the Tribune emits a publication cynical toward them. RedEye starts for real today. And at the moment, RedEye lacks a credible, content-driven online presence. This is would be unusual for any new publication — let alone one targeted to the PDA generation.
The Tribune is trying to lure the young readers who don't read the Trib itself — understandable given a publication that's increasingly by and for a wealthy population residing in a strip straight north from the overcondoed River North to the moneyed North Shore suburbs — but given what appears in RedEye, they assume that if the youth of America is not reading the
Tribune, it's not seeing any news at all. I guess they haven't heard of Fark. Or CNN.com.
The idea is to give readers a baby Tribune so they'll move up to the real deal, which may explain why most everything in RedEye is rehashed wire or Tribune copy, with front, business, metro, sports, arts and opinion sections, except they're given "hipper" names. Opinion, of course, is called "P.O.V."
But it gets worse.
First, there's the Alison Neumer column on page 2, which conforms to every older person's stereotype about selfish, spoiled post-collegians. This week's column is about the crashing stock market; the anecdote she leads with tells of two friends who were going to get a beautiful wedding reception paid for by their parents, but now that their folks' portfolio has been A-bombed, the young couple will have to — please avert your eyes if you can't stand the horror about to be revealed — pay for it themselves.
And this is the paragraph that follows this heart-wrenching introduction: "Granted, this situation is a far cry from the elderly people who ration their
medication by splitting pills or live on Spam, but it is still a difficult family issue." Of course that situation is far removed. It's a wedding reception. Basically, the rest of the column is Neumer whining about the inheritance she's not going to get now that the market stinks. It's the sort
of thing you'd recoil from in your college paper — but RedEye dives right in.
Then there's the hep talk sprinkled throughout the
rest of the paper. If you've ever seen the alleged
humor items in the Tempo section, you know the Tribune
is not a paper that does funny well. You also know
that the Tribune finds great humor in poor white
people who aren't in the paper's target demographic.
Not surprisingly, that combination of stunningly unfunny and snobbish
rears its ugly head in RedEye.
There's a sports column called "Grandstanding: Cheap
Shots from the Cheap Seats" that makes Bill
Scheft's execrable column of one-liners in Sports
Illustrated look like Woody Allen.
Here's one "Grandstanding" item — "Billy the Marlin: John Routh,
estimated to have made 75 large a year to be the body
and brains of the Florida mascot since the club's
beginning, was let go. Albert the Alligator from the
University of Florida is the early front-runner to
replace him." Excuse me while I get my appendix
removed, because it burst while I laughed. And 75
large — straight up, G!
Sports, in this issue, is by far the worst offender in sounding like your trying-to-be-with-it uncle. For the NBA standings, they list the team, record, "stud" and "dud" players, a one-line "short attention span outlook" (done with much more verve as "The Skinny" in the short-lived sports daily The National, a truly excellent publication that lived and died in the early 1990s) and what the team is doing that day. If they're not playing, they're "cribbin'." I presume they mean staying home, although a team playing at home could be
"cribbin'," or perhaps a team downloading term papers off the web could be "cribbin'." (A team engaged in a card game featuring a wooden pegboard would be
"cribbage.")
And the big featured photo on the front page is a picture of the attorney general candidates' debate, surrounded by poll numbers and a headline "Madigan Holding Strong" (referring to Democratic candidate Lisa Madigan.) It's as boring as it sounds.
The dopey thing is, they're trying to rip off Metro, the transit system-delivered paper with US bases in Boston and Philadelphia, as a means to make money, and the Metro chain worldwide has had mixed financial
results, including the closing of papers.
And I can't imagine why anyone would pay 25 cents for RedEye — yes, they're charging for this. About all the articles you've probably read on a news website somewhere the day before. Plus, if you're going to pay for a paper, why not just throw in another dime and get the Chicago Sun-Times, still a tabloid but heftier, and with a larger circulation among twentysomethings than the Tribune?
By the way, it should be noted that the Sun-Times is responding to RedEye by forming its own youth paper, Red Streak. This despite once having a similar paper, Next, that failed. Of course, it's not about attracting an audience with Red Streak — it's about making sure that RedEye suffers. Maybe that will
happen, but until then, it will be RedEye readers
who'll be suffering.
E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.
What's Bad and Red and Doomed All Over?