The Free Press

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Russel Pergament's assault on New York City's ultracompetitive newspaper market is admirable for its audacity. Pergament is focusing on 18-to-34-year-olds, a segment that basically doesn't read newspapers. Last fall he launched amNewYork (circ. 209,000), a daily designed to attract the younger set by keeping news short and photos plentiful. It's free, it's small, and it's largely paid for by the Tribune Co., one of the nation's largest publishing companies. "What these kids like is fast, blather free and unbiased," he says. "Something to give them a good, comprehensive scan of the country in 20 minutes."

amNewYork is one of the latest bids in a broad effort to revive the newspaper industry after more than a decade of eroding circulation and closures. For years, papers have tried to attract gens X and Y with everything from hipper coverage to school partnerships to targeted pullout sections. Now several publishers are launching stand-alone papers with content tailored to the under-35 crowd, which tends to get its news from cable TV, websites and niche publications. According to a University of Chicago survey, fewer than a quarter of Americans ages 18 to 29 read a newspaper every day.

In recent months, newspapers from Belo Corp.'s Dallas Morning News to the Gannett Co.'s Wilmington (Del.) News Journal have rolled out separate, free tabloids to appeal to that missing demographic. Some, like the Washington Post Co.'s Express, appear daily and are newsy, boiled-down versions of the broadsheet. Others are weekly and focus more on entertainment and lifestyle, like Gannett's CiN Weekly in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Knight-Ridder's StreetMiami, produced by the Miami Herald.

"Our main goal is to create new generations of newspaper readers," says John O'Loughlin, general manager of the Chicago Tribune's RedEye edition, a youth-oriented daily that competes with the Chicago Sun-Times's Red Streak. The industry hopes to hook the kids now and eventually have them trade up to the marquee, paid product. In an early rumbling of that hoped-for switch, RedEye manages to sell about 15% of its copies at 25 apiece.

Industry analysts are unsure whether many young readers will ever convert to paying customers. But the analysts mostly agree that the freebies add value by increasing market share and attracting new, youth-seeking advertising dollars. The Tribune's RedEye (circ. 85,000), for example, has not turned a profit, but it has attracted 350 new advertisers to the Trib. Plus, since newspaper companies use existing assets like printing plants, journalists and distribution networks, the cost of added operations is incremental, says James Marsh, an analyst at SG Cowen Securities. Most of the free papers are break-even propositions for now.

For amNewYork, the stakes are higher. Although backed by Tribune money, it is operationally independent, which means it can't piggyback on the parent company's publishing assets. In that sense, it's similar to other stand-alone urban papers like the ones London's Metro International publishes in Boston and Philadelphia or American Consolidated Media's A.M. Journal Express (circ. 140,000) in Dallas. With short, straightforward stories that seldom jump from one page to another, these papers focus on the busy commuter lifestyle, which happens to translate into younger readers. What those readers get is a mix of news stories from outside sources such as the Associated Press and ones by the papers' staff writers. Metro, which runs 34 papers in more than 70 cities, has had success abroad, but in Boston it has just earned its first quarterly profit — only after a cost-reduction program.

More tabloids are on the way. Metro is planning a New York City edition this year, while Gannett and others are considering launches of youth-oriented stand-alones. "It's too early to declare it a successful strategy," says John Morton, an independent newspaper analyst and president of Morton Research Inc. "But nothing has really worked well in the past. The chief quality here is that it's a different approach."