Newspapers for Kids: Talk to Kids Every Day to Reach New Subscribers and to Improve Retention

Talking to readers in their 20s is too late. Reading habits have formed. It is at a much younger age that newspapers need to establish a relationship with readers. A challenge that The Miami Herald is attempting to achieve with three daily newspapers for kids ages 5 to 13 years old.

Establishing a relationship between a newspaper brand and the young readers of a community is the first target and long-term strategy of Daily 7, Daily 10 and Daily 13. Three age-specific daily newspapers that have been launched by The Miami Herald and the children’s publisher, Play Bac Presse, on Monday, April 4, 2005. Improving retention and acquiring new subscribers is the second target that should provide short-term results.

These newspapers are inserted free-of-charge into The Miami Herald home-delivered Monday through Friday in a test zone of 14,000 households. This test continues for five months in the Kendale Lakes area of Miami-Dade county. The goal is to evaluate the improvement in retention.

In addition, 25,000 copies are distributed to schools Monday through Friday to all kids in the test zone. They will be receiving them until the end of the school year. Parents will have to subscribe to The Miami Herald in order to continue receiving the newspapers for their kids. The goal is to acquire new subscribers.

Daily 7 is for readers ages 5 to 7, Daily 10 for ages 8 to 10 and Daily 13 for ages 11 to 13. In a tabloid format and full-color, they deliver news customized for each age group. “Kids have different centers of interest based on their age. It’s why we need separate newspapers.” explains Francois Dufour, Editor-in-chief of Play Bac Presse and of the French and American publications. The language and vocabulary are adapted to their reading levels. The difficult words are explained.

Play Bac Presse is an expert in reaching young audiences. It has been publishing four daily newspapers for kids for ten years in France. They have 200,000 subscribers. The company is also the co-inventor of Brain Quest, an educational trivia game in the US, that has sold around 25 million copies.

“Play Bac Presse has shown that once children in France get the paper, the parents keep buying it because they do not want to disappoint their children,” declared Tom Fiedler, The Miami Herald Executive Editor in the ASNE (American Society for News Editors) Reporter in Friday, April 15’s issue.

“If news organizations talk to kids, parents will develop a stronger relationship with their brand” confirms Jeff Mignon, CEO of 5W Mignon-Media, a New York-based media consultancy, that helped to create and launch the French kids’ newspapers and now the American ones. “Readers expect their newspapers to help make them smarter. Don’t you think that they are going to love you if you help to make their kids smarter? And don’t you think that newspaper brands are then going to benefit from this service?”.

The idea is to create a family community around news. “You have provided an excellent tool for family discussion at the dinner table and the format is excellent”, explains a mother in an email to The Miami Herald. Kids are interested in having a newspaper of their own written for them. The French success shows it. “All the articles caught my eye, and I couldn't help myself from reading almost all of them” comments a 13-year-old girl in another email to The Herald.

Parents feel the need to have help for their children. “My girls ages 7 and 9 really love having a section of the newspaper just for them. The articles are just the right length to be useful for school activities but short enough to keep them interested. Good way to reach out to kids and make reading fun!” said a mother in her email to the Florida newspaper.

Educators also are interested in supporting kids’ learning, reading and understanding of the world. “We have read the Daily 10 and Daily 7 during the last four days. It has told us many things happening in the world this week. It teaches us information like new vocabulary words that are highlighted like we highlight in our Reading class.” , witnesses a third grade teacher at an Elementary School in Miami.

In addition to free insertion to newspaper subscribers and school sampling, there are three other ways to use these daily newspapers for kids. First, marketing can offer them as a separate subscription. Second, marketing can also use them as a tool to transform single copy buyers or non-subscribers into 7-day subscribers through newsstand sampling and traditional direct marketing. Third, advertising can use these newspapers as a vehicle for local or regional advertising.

Want to join the test? Newspapers are free until the end of August 2005. Easy: Play Bac Presse USA will send you electronic files (PDF) ready for printing on your press. For more information: contact Nancy Wang 212-621-6965 or nwang@mignon-media.com / n.wang@playbac.fr.

The future of the news industry seriously threatened

"The future of the U.S. news industry is seriously threatened by the seemingly irrevocable move by young people away from traditional sources of news." wrote Merrill Brown in his report for the Carnegie Corporation of New York. A report that I discovered through the excellent blog of Dan Gillmor .

Merrill is speaking about "a dramatic revolution". According to him: "The future course of the news, including the basic assumptions about how we consume news and information and make decisions in a democratic society are being altered by technology-savvy young people no longer wedded to traditional news outlets or even accessing news in traditional ways." And to also say: "Through Internet portal sites, handheld devices, blogs and instant messaging, we are accessing and processing information in ways that challenge the historic function of the news business and raise fundamental questions about the future of the news field."

For him, the revolution is not only about the way we are getting news but also about who is going to do the news: "New forms of news-gathering and distribution, grassroots or citizen journalism and blogging sites are changing the very nature of who produces news."

Merrill's report is based on a survey of 18-to-34-year-olds carried out by Magid Associates in May 2004. The goal of it was to determine how this population is getting news today and how it is going to be in the future.

We learn that local TV is the first source of news, with more than 70% of this target using it at least once a week, followed by the internet and the newspapers. But internet ranks first "among men, high-income groups, and broadband users.

We can read that based on daily usage, internet comes first. Also, 41% of this population thinks that internet is "the best way to learn", followed by TV (15%) and newspapers (8%). Then, 49% think that the internet is best to provide news "only when I want". A critical element for the audience insists Merrill: "Clearly, young people don't want to rely on the morning paper on their doorstep or the dinnertime newscast for up-to-date information; in fact, they —as well as others— want their news on demand, when it works for them".

Newspapers, according to his report, are ranked "as the third most important news source, newspapers have no clear strengths and are the least preferred choice for local, national and international news."

He is calling for: "A Time for Radical Thinking". Something that is not going to happen yet according to Rusty Coats, Director of New Media at Minnesota Opinion Research, Inc.: “By and large, the major news companies are still turning a blind eye to what is happening because it's challenging and they need to consider radical change.”

It is also the opinion of Jay Rosen, teacher in Journalism at NYU in his excellent blog Press Think : "The harvesting of the newspaper's monopoly position has apparently begun. The assisted suicide is underway. But not in every company, or every town, which kind of makes it interesting. It could be a great nonfiction book someday: Laying the Newspaper Gently Down to Die."

A pessimism that shares Jack Shafer from Slate: "There is no way to overstate the complacency or arrogance of the greater newspaper industry." So, insists Merril Brown: "Few news organizations think methodically and creatively about product development, and resources allocated to studying and inventing new news products are generally miniscule."

But, newspapers are making money. In 2004, their profits increased by 8%, versus 4% gain in revenue, according to The Newspaper Association of America. Margins averaged 22.9% said analyst Laurent Fine. But how is this possible? In cutting back costs. According to the 2005 State of Media report provided by he Project for Excellence in Journalism, in 2004, US newspapers "employed fewer reporters and editors" insists Jay Rosen. And also, in rasing advertising rates. "In many markets, the big daily acts like a quasi-monopoly, raising advertising rates annually or semi-annually—anything to reach those historic 30 percent margins. As falling circulation has put a crimp in advertising rates, some newspapers such as Newsday, Hoy, the Dallas Morning News, and the Chicago Sun-Times have padded the numbers to appear healthy, defrauding advertisers in the process." writes Shafer.

And Rosen to quote Michael E. Porter, Harvard professor, about the consequences of this king of business practices: "smaller news-hole, lighter staffing, and reduced community service, leading, of course, to fading readership, declining circulation, and lost advertising. Plot it on a graph, and it looks like a death spiral."

Because what seems important for publishers is not about investing in new projects and taking risks, it is about distributing dividends to the share holders. "If older media sectors focus on profit-taking and stock price, they may do so at the expense of building the new technologies that are vital to the future. There are signs that may be occurring," warned the report of The Project for Excellence in Journalism. "Our data suggest that news organizations have imposed more cutbacks in their Internet operations than in their old media."

So are "newspapers dead"? As Michael S. Malone explains in his column for ABCNews, "Most newspapers are unbelievably retrograde. They grew up in a world of newsprint and that's where they intend to stay. They cannot believe an institution as venerable as the newspaper can ever go away. They are wrong. And their publications will die first. All of them."

Probably not. But it is time to wake up. Right?