Gen Why

By Dick Hughes  

FEBRUARY 24, 2011 11:55 a.m. (0)

A national website with live anchors giving newscasts 24 hours a day in the style of Jon Stewart launches Tuesday from the Upstate.

OneMinuteNews.com targets 21-34 year olds by linking news with social networking. Its founders hope by making news a touch away it will challenge the myth that Generation Y is not interested in news.

Young adults are potential consumers of news when it is presented the way they want it: in short bursts by contemporaries with an attitude and available whenever they want it on their smart phones, digital readers or computers, said Douglas J. Greenlaw, who originated OneMinuteNews.com and raised millions in start-up money.

The newscasts are refreshed every 15 minutes. A click away is the social networking application where users can build a profile page, drag theirs from Facebook and do pretty much everything they do on that popular site.

The site is interactive to allow users an opportunity to participate in polls, discuss stories and contribute to news gathering. Regular bloggers write about matters of interest from the Gen Y perspective.

“The social networking side is key. These young people like to talk to each other,” Greenlaw said. “When you come to OneMinuteNews.com, you’ll reach a newscast, and you touch on breaking news, sports, entertainment. There are about six buttons you can go to. Each button represents 60 seconds worth of content.”

But Greenlaw said it differs from social networking because the site has content.

“Our content is news 24/7, news for young people, constructed by, programmed by, live-anchored by Generation Y for Generation Y between the ages of 21 and 34.”

There is nothing like it, and Greenlaw is convinced OneMinuteNews.com will be a household name and profitable within a year. “It could be the next MTV,” said Greenlaw, who helped transform MTV Networks from “an entrepreneurial grab bag kind of place and institutionalized it into a mainstream of Madison Avenue.”

Greenlaw’s experience includes executive positions at other online and TV enterprises. He was chief operating officer of Greenville’s Multimedia Inc., and he is one of the founders of Community Journals, which publishes the Greenville Journal and Spartanburg Journal.

To get an idea of what a newscast will be like, said Greenlaw, think of Jon Stewart at 28 having gone into journalism instead of comedy.

“That’s the sort of attitude our anchors will have. It will be spicy. It will be fast, furious and it will not be political. No right wing, no left wing.”

The Generation Y preference for news in “short pieces” applies as well to advertising, Greenlaw believes.

“When you go to CNN, AOL, Yahoo, all the big boys, you get their 30-second TV commercial. It is 30 seconds before you get what you want. With us, it is three seconds to 15 seconds in length at the longest, and it is all video. No banner advertising.”

Greenlaw is going to “pick and choose the coolest advertising. My research has shown that they (Gen Y) would prefer to have no advertising. But they say we’ll accept advertising, just don’t smash us in the face with it. These 15-second ads, they are fine with. Just don’t run AARP ads.”

Gen Yers may want attitude, but they don’t want blah, blah, blah, said Greenlaw. “They say tell me like it is. Don’t B.S. me. Give it to me fast and furious and just the highlights. I will figure out the rest on my own.”

Greenlaw assembled a staff of 25 journalists from around the country, all in the Gen Y age bracket, to produce OneMinuteNews from a 5,000-square-foot newsroom and studio at the Innovate Building on River Street.

“We have all the news sources that any of the heavyweights have. It will just be edited differently, and it will be presented a lot differently than, say, Brian Williams on the evening news.

News director George Alexander, a veteran of Fox and CNN news in Atlanta, said the newscasts are “anchor driven. Personality is encouraged. Attitude is encouraged.”

The staff will feature angles in news events that relate to their audience, he said. For example, reporting on the upheaval in the Middle East could be on the high percentage of young people in the population and how the Internet has weakened dictatorships.

“As a backpack journalist, I want to bring people into the story rather than just tell them the story. I want my generation to understand why the news is important and why it matters to us,” said anchor Yasmin Vossoughian.

The presentation, Alexander said, is more free-flowing than network and cable news. The sets are unpretentious, and the anchors dress casually. No ties, no hairspray, no heavy makeup.

“All natural,” said Greenlaw. “These are bright young journalists. It is not the Fox model of show me the beautiful blond. They are nice looking people, don’t get me wrong, but we are not going for cleavage and short skirts.”

Greenlaw said OneMinuteNews has a technological advantage because it is tailored for small screens. “The difference between us and others is that normally a Web site is for the computer. They take it and squeeze onto the mobile. We are treating ours to be mobile ready and adapting it to the computer. Mobile is our focus.”

Greenlaw is confident OneMinuteNews will fill an advertising void through disciplined focus on adults between 21 and 34, who are not reading newspapers and are abandoning TV and thus putting themselves out of sight of advertisers who need that age market.

And he is betting he is right that young people are interested in news and have been getting it from several sources, just not from the traditional ones.

“They get it everywhere. They get it on their home page, like Yahoo, AOL or Google. They get it from Jon Stewart, from Jay Leno, David Letterman.”

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