News for young people? Riiiigggghhhhhttttt....

We started seeing ads for something called ytribune.com all over the Internet recently, a site that bills itself as "a youth newspaper with online news & entertainment."
Naturally, we had to check it out, for all the obvious reasons.
The site has the big cartoonish woman's head on the left side with a little tag line beside it that says, "Let's rock!! A young newspaper.... Lot's of hosts."
Yeah, that's what it said: "Lot's of hosts."
To the right are short news stories from a CNN feed, gossip from an NBC feed, music news from a Yahoo feed and games news from a gamespot.com feed.
In short, there's nothing really there.
But what we really loved was this little tidbit:

Statement from the news staff: "We like daily news articles for young people to be short and precise.We don't want boring hosts, but a colorful newspaper for today's youth.Yet our latest articles are all selected from trustworthy news sources.This is to provide the best possible daily youth newspaper online of today. Have a good read!"

Young people are, of course, attracted to short and colorful glop. Everyone knows that. Surely they wouldn't be attracted by real news that, hhhhmmmmmm, takes teens seriously?
In its way, you have to admire the sheer gall of whoever set this ytribune site up. It has nothing original, just newsfeeds from other sources that are readily available in, oh, maybe a million other places on the web.
But what's most insulting isn't that it pretends to be a news site. It's the underlying philosophy that basically says young people are too stupid and their attention spans are too short to absorb something as complex as, say, a genuine news story.
We're proud to think differently at The Tattoo.



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