Oh My God! They Killed 'Your Mom'

Your Mom is dead.

Or, as the Quad-City Times in Davenport, Iowa, crudely and kind of cruelly puts it on the former site of the unique print/Web community product: "Your Mom is no longer online!"

Your Mom is dead, and we should all mourn that fact, because apart from whatever market-specific facts led to its demise in Iowa, this quirky product dreamed up by a bunch of journalism grad students represented the best effort ever to attract U.S. teenagers to newspapers.

"Newspapers know that teenagers are the future, and that they've got to get them, but what they come up with is so lame that teenagers see right through them," Rich Gordon told me Thursday. "And here was something that teenagers actually thought was a cool thing, and literally I haven't seen anything in the newspaper industry ... that came anywhere close to connecting with teenagers like Your Mom did."

Gordon is an associate professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, and directs their Digital Technology in Education program. It was his class of grad students who created Your Mom under a contract with the Lee Enterprises newspaper.

Gordon was preaching to the choir in our conversation. E&P named Your Mom one of our "Ten That Do It Right" newspaper products in 2005, when it was not quite even a year old.

I'd heard good things about Your Mom from afar, but I was sold when I attended one of the regular Wednesday night sessions of the 18 or so kids who put out the Your Mom print version every week. It was like no other news budget meeting I'd ever sat in on, with an electric energy charged even more by the fact that it was teenagers -- teenagers! -- churning out ideas to use a newspaper to communicate with their peers.

I drove back to Chicago that night fairly bursting with optimism about the future of newspapers. I knew even more that Your Mom was onto something when my son, then 14, devoured the copies I had brought back. A Chicago kid was avidly reading content written by and for kids 200 hundred miles away in Bix Beiderbecke's birthplace.

As it turns out, that spring night I was witnessing pretty much the high-water mark for Your Mom.

A few months later, Hillary Rhodes, the high-energy Medill student the Quad-City Times hired to be the founding editor/cool big sister to Your Mom, was herself hired away by The Associated Press for its own youth-oriented initiative, asap.

After her departure, the Times almost immediately killed the print version of Your Mom, a funky and narrow (6-by-10 1/2 inches) mini-tab with funky typography and teenaged reporting that either horrified or charmed advisors of area high school