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The Media

January 2004

The Mountains of Instead

by James Bowman

It takes but a slight acquaintance with the newspaper business to see that the large corporations which run Americas newspapers are worried sick about the demographic profile of their product. The average age of newspaper readers in this country is somewhere in the mid-fifties, and the paucity of more youthful readers has led a number of the established companies, including the owners of The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Sun-Times, and The Dallas Morning News, recently to set up separate, youth-oriented papers to compete with the parent product in the same market. This they do by offering the much abbreviated news-sheet approach that busy, non-reading young people with many electronic sources of news available to them are supposed to favor. The Dallas project, called Quick, was rushed into production ahead of schedule in November because of a rival start-up called A.M. Journal Express.

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James Bowman is the author of Honor: A History (Encounter Books) and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, also published by Encounter (2008)
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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 22 January 2004, on page 54
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