Media Watch

Yes, Virginia, there was a newspaper...

Reminding most readers who have never seen one what a newspaper was

By Walter Brooks, guerrilla marketer

Older readers are familiar with that old chestnut of a story which newspapers reprint every year around Christmas, "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus."

Editor Church answer, "Virginia, our little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age," wouldn't have sat well with today's tech-savvy kids. Maybe it's the mustache.

Today, however, it is more necessary to remind the vast majority of readers under the age of forty what a newspaper was when there were ones worthy of the name still being published.

Editor Francis Pharcellus Church's response in long-gone New York Sun when eight-year-old Virginia O'Hanlon wrote to ask if there really was a Santa Claus, compared that belief to the love and generosity and devotion which exist in the human heart.

Today's more skeptical and tech savvy eight-year old readers would be more amused at Editor Church than at young Virginia O'Hanlon, because your grandchildren are years ahead of Virgina at that age, and probably teach you how to use the web, iPhone, and most other gadgets you buy.

And no of the eight-year old today ever read a daily newspaper. Not just kids, less than 19 percent of Americans under age forty read a daily newspaper any longer either.

How to own the heart, minds and wallets of twenty-somethings

When my then thirty-something daughter-in-law Julie Brooks and I launched CapeCodTODAY.com fifteen years ago, we asked every young person between 15 and 20 whom we ran into, "what would have to be on a website for you to want to check it out every day?'

Their collective answers became the nucleus of the first editions of CapeCodTODAY.

The we sat back and waited ten years until those young cyber-savvy children were twenty-five and the kind of 'active consumer' every advertiser wants.

Our format has evolved enormously in fifteen years, but the target remains active consumers who turn out to never read newspapers.

They get their information from non-traditional media like The Daily Show and newssites like ours.

Today the median age of our readers is over fifty, but we still cater to the 'flash mob' mentality because readers really decide which of us succeeds or fails.

Are they reading your newspaper today?

If you are a newspaper publisher or work for one, I guarantee you there is a Walter Brooks and his daughter-in-law Julie in your town who thinks they can own the future instead of you.

You can wait until that happens, and share your present market with some upstarts like us, or allow us to help you compete with yourselves with a CommunityDailyNews.com edition of your own.

In the mean time, read the obituaries in your local newspaper. It will list that newspaper's ex-subscribers who are not being replaced by today's younger readers.

As Claire Booth Luce said, "The money is always out there - only the pockets change."