It takes but a slight acquaintance with the newspaper business to see that the large corporations which run America’s 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.

At the time Eric Celeste, a writer for an alternative newspaper called The Dallas Observer, wrote what I took to be a not entirely facetious article pointing to a potentially fatal lacuna in the kiddie papers being produced by established newspaper companies. “If you want your newspaper to appeal to young people,” he advised his own paper’s new competitors, “you must be willing to print the word—” but then you know what the word is, don’t you? It’s the same word that writers used first to shock, in the days of Joyce and D. H. Lawrence,