Karl Klockars

KidsNews is dead. Long live KidsNews.

The Trib finally killed the section that birthed my entrance into the Chicago media, in the most innoccuous way possible. Believe it or not, KidsNews was the first major market outlet that printed anything I ever did, all the way back when I was in the 9th grade or so. It was hate mail. I was a jerk. And the whole of the newspaper-reading gradeschoolers hated me back.

The ax came down quietly, and I’m sure not many will miss it. The only way I found out about it was through Eric Zorn’s blog on the Trib’s website. The obit:

May 8th, 2007, RIP: “The Tribune’s KidNews section/page says farewell today, 768 weeks after it started.

My children, now 9 to 17, were never avid KidNews readers, but I sensed that its very presence every week on the dining room table helped create a bond between them and the idea of a newspaper. This is not just something that dad and his friends write for each other.

Finer minds than mine are working hard at creating new generations of newspaper readers and subscribers, but I thought this moment in local journalism history would be a good opportunity to ask for your memories of from nearly 15 years of KidNews.”

My bad. KidNews. Drop the “s.” I probably wouldn’t have misspelled “Tempo” but then, I’m not 12 years old and they didn’t really work that hard on branding the section, I’m sure. So how about a memory of KidNews? Sure. No problem.

Remember when KidNews used to be a whole section? About once a week (on Tuesdays, I believe) they’d have about 6-10 pages shuffled somewhere behind the comics. Kids read comics, kids’ll read KidNews, right? Makes sense to me. If it was Wednesday, then I’d be reading the section while eating my Entemann’s chocolate donuts. I was a child of routine, to be sure.

When I was a kid, I would happily devour anything that the media world spoon-fed me. Transformers, Ninja Turtles, M.A.S.K – if it was animated and had a cereal related to it, we were cool. I would watch anything, read any sort of tripe that had words on it, and so on. I was a sponge. And I never complained about anything.

Until KidNews. My god, the rage the section inspired in me at a nearly pre- pubescent age still astounds me. To my eye, it was condescending, second-rate feel-good pap with some bad cartoons tossed in there for good measure. If there was nothing in there that even I could find tolerable, then by god, someone had to do something about it.

By far, the worst part of the section was the letters section. Every week, I would seethe behind my turtleshell glasses and veritably crap my little catholic-school pants with hatred towards these fools, my peers. The ones who would write in about how they think that last week’s cartoon was “too mean.”

And the Tribune, bastards that they are, would take letters sent by kids that were so completely wrong and dumbheaded so as to be painful, and run them. Kids that didn’t understand some piece of a “how to garden!” article and then write in that they didn’t like dirt. Kids that would read about how to make popsicles and didn’t know how to make ice. The sadists at the copy desk would put those in the paper, either as a sick joke to themselves or because those were the only eight letters they got that week.

I should hasten to add that this would be somewhere around 1992. No email, no myspace accounts for newspaper sections, no text message updates. Back in the days when if we wanted to send a letter, we had to use paper, dammit! And pay for postage! And yes, we liked it like that. Here, hold my cane.

I don’t know exactly the word count of the document I crafted, but it was somewhere around the realm of nine pages, single spaced, printed out on a classic dot matrix printer. Probably something in the vicinity of 8 point font. That’s a lot of words. I was either severely pissed off, or it was raining that day. I can’t really remember.

After putting it in the mail, I felt better. More free. Lighter, like I had fought for justice and truth and sanity. Two days hense, Mom called me up from the basement and my Legos. “There’s someone on the phone – he sounds old,” she said. I furrowed my brow – maybe it was a Scoutmaster or something. I was a dork.

“Hi, this is blah blah blah from the Chicago Tribune. We’ve recieved your letter – would it be okay with you if we printed it?”

Now that I think about it, 14 years later, I wonder who that poor editor was. For all I know, it was Greg Kot or Royko slumming it around six-packs that day. I remember he sounded youngish. Maybe it was Kot. I furrowed my brow, said “sure, I guess so,” and hung up the phone. I’m sure that after a long and hard day powering out KidNews copy, I gave that guy an entertaining afternoon of calling his friends around to read my inanity. Hell, I’d laugh at it.

For some reason, I didn’t understand the idea of “editing.” I was under the impression that they were going to publish my full manifesto, my work of genius to the world that positioned me as their KidNews High Lord and Master. The reading populace would say “of course! All are fools compared to thee!” And KidNews would die under my hand.

Naturally, it didn’t play out that way. My desperate rage fell victim to the editing floor, and my expected full-page ad against the children of the Chicagoland area became a two or three paragraph whine. I was shocked. They said they wanted to print my letter! I could only have assumed they saw the wisdom beyond the author’s years locked in the text!

Instead, my impassioned arguments, taken step by step through each and every letter-writer from the previous week, impaled on my Bank Street Writer’s Plus Sword of Truth, fell deathly flat. I looked like an asshole. And probably on purpose. Some idiot 12 year old kid spends hours writing about how he hates a newspaper section? If was the editor, I’d make me look like an asshole as well.

My sick vindication: I got the most hate mail that KidNews had ever recieved up to that point – possibly ever. I should look into that. See if my record stands. I bet it does.

The week after my letter ran, the entire letters section was devoted to my beloved audience and their absolute loathing of me. At least, that’s how I remember it now. One thing I’m damn near positive about: The Chicago Tribune called me, little 12 year old me, a loser. Literally. The word loser, right near the words “You’re a ______, K-man.” They summarized all the angry, vicious things the other KidNews-ers had written, and Colonel McCormack’s shining beacon of journalism called tiny little me a loser. And they called me K-man.

Awesome.

You’d be inclined to say that this event planted the seeds for a life of writing and creating and fighting the good fight. That I was truly born at that moment, ready to craft words and sentences and bring that section down one way or another.

That somehow, I would make myself into a living, breathing writing demon. I don’t know how true that is – I was already writing my Ninja Turtle short stories and getting the manuscript ready for the publisher I never found. Over the years, KidNews got smaller and smaller, eventually becoming a single page on the back of a section. If I recall.

My affliction with the section diminished after that as well, to being just a blip on the radar for another couple years, until booze and rock and roll and girls (and marching band…dork) took me off in another direction. I do know this – I shed no tears for KidNews, as it shed no tears for me.

Goodbye, sweet idiot newspaper section. With you, dies a portion of my childhood. From now on, for asinine commentary and damn-fool prose in my papers, I’m simply going to have to read the Red Eye.