I will be completely honest: there have been times in my two years as editor that I didn’t feel very hopeful for the long-term future of The Chronicle — the oft-spoken cries of “print media is dying” and “young people aren’t interested in community news” were genuinely getting to me.
Last Thursday night, however, all my worries and doubts went out the window.
Jewish Federation of Greater Kansas City’s Young Adults Division (YAD) hosts Impact events, which highlight community organizations that work with and are supported by Federation. Last Thursday, The Chronicle was the featured organization.
As a YAD participant, I appreciate how these events teach us about aspects of the community that we don’t often think about, and the opportunity to be part of the featured organization was incredible.
Assistant Editor Lacey Storer and I eagerly anticipated this event, because one of our major goals for The Chronicle is gaining younger readers. Still, I tried to manage my expectations; in my head, I was worrying, “What kind of young adult is going to shlep out to talk about a newspaper?”
Well, I’m thrilled to report that instead of the dozen-or-so participants that I predicted, we had nearly 30 young adults come to Front Range Cafe in Waldo to hear our shpiel about the paper. With the incredible help of YAD Event Coordinator Kaitlin Birnbaum and YAD Philanthropy Chair Jay Gilman (as well as tons of moral and organizational support from friends of The Chronicle), the event exceeded our expectations by miles.
After I explained The Chronicle’s history and processes, attendees were divided into breakout groups to discuss ideas on how to entice younger readers, themselves included. The feedback and ideas were extremely helpful — it’s clear that The Chronicle must lean more into the digital sphere, and attendees had creative and useful ideas that we would love to implement.
As thanks to those who signed up, we dug back into The Chronicle’s archives (available at kcjc.com/archive) to find past mentions of them, whether that be a birth announcement, Spotlight photo or quote. For those who were new to the community or never featured in The Chronicle before, we promised that they would be today — take a look at the photo above.
The future of The Chronicle looks bright, and I’m excited to know that there are more young adults who are interested in it than we ever imagined.
With the feedback we got from YAD attendees and the ideas we received through our readers survey last year, we’re getting a picture of how the Chronicle can continue to improve and evolve in ways that all can appreciate. As always, we promise to keep you posted.
