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• NEWSPAPERS: We have seen the future of newspapers—if that isn't a contradiction in terms—in the form of Red Eye, the Chicago Tribune's hip new newspaper for readers age 18-34. "Make articles shorter and choose relevant stories," is the paper's professed creed. It isn't clear "what relevance means at RedEye, but a lot of great editors have demonstrated it can become whatever you want to make it," wrote Chicago Reader media critic Michael Miner. "So far, RedEye and Red Streak [the Chicago Sun-Times' counterpart] haven't made it much of anything."
Still, Miner points out that Red Eye wouldn't have to appear so desperate to find a new generation of newspaper readers if the Tribune itself weren't so somnolent. There may be nobility in taking journalism seriously, but not in being boring. The Tribune, says Miner, "is gray and forbidding." As he points out, "RedEye could be a laboratory for the kind of lively writing and design the Tribune seems too lumbering and institutional to accommodate."
http://www.chireader.com/hottype/2002/021108_1.html
Also:
My thoughts on RedEyein the Banner, and on media and relevance at nbierma.com/journalism. Read my op-ed column for RedEye last fall here.
CJR on RedEye and what young readers want in a newspaper
• LITERATURE SCHOLARSHIP: It's a bad time to be an English professor, says syndicated columnist Suzanne Fields. The profession suffered the biggest plunge in new jobs in ten years, from 983 in 2002 to 792 this year. The tweed-clad have only themselves to blame for trivializing their work, Fields says.
Somewhere in the cracks between the "Derridadaist" and the Neo-Marxist, the Poststructuralist and the Deconstructionist, literature got lost. Between the New Historicist and Biopoeticist, radical feminist and post-colonialist perspectives, the language was hopelessly garbled. … In the hodgepodge known as modern scholarship, students of literature are taught that there is no "Shakespeare himself." The actual author is the reader. There's no such thing as beauty or truth, common sense is the "bourgeois status quo" and there's no distinction between "text" and theory.
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/suzannefields/sf20030117.shtml
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