It's no great revelation of human nature that we see what we want to see, read what we want to read, and twist research findings to suit our purposes. Well, not you or me, but other people .

I got a kick out of the Adam comic I saw in the [Springfield, Mass.] Republican this morning. In the first panel, a guy (presumably Adam) is reading the a newspaper article aloud: "Further evidence confirms coffee may indeed counteract alcohol's effect on the liver." The second panel shows the guy facing us and saying, "Irish coffee sales should soar."

When I was growing up, I couldn't wait for my father to get home with his briefcase full of five New York daily newspapers — the Daily News, the Post, the World Telegram, Newsday and the Journal American — whose comic pages I devoured. (Two others didn't count: The Times was a barren wasteland of type and if the Herald Tribune had funnies, I don't remember them.) Sundays, with their color pages, were even better.

Somewhere along the line, I stopped reading comics — no doubt to my detriment — but a poster trumpeting two color pages of funnies every day made me check out the Republican today. I'd never seen daily comics in color, although I'd bet that the Repubican is not the first paper to run them. I stopped reading Editor & Publisher, the newspaper trade magazine that used to inform me about such things, about the time that it went online.

Alas, I don't think this innovation is going to make newspapers any more relevant to kids. We're on a tour of colleges with Duncan, who will be a senior next year. He's been text messaging on his phone all day and IMing next to me on Deirdre's laptop for three hours. During our college tours, he clicks away with his tiny digital camera to take visual notes the way I'll pull out a notebook. In other words, he's very media savvy, twenty-first-century style. Interactive, digital, visual. Newspapers have never been part of his media equation, and I doubt they ever will be. I got excited this morning when he actually read a headline over my shoulder in USA Today (and then asked me what the story was about). Kids ten years younger, who are the age I was when I started reading the funny pages, are even further removed from developing a newspaper habit.

I assumed, of course, that I'd be able to find the Adam cartoon online and I did with no problem. What surprised me, though, was that I'm not able to link to it permanently. The "postcard" I send myself and linked to above will expire in two weeks. The site that brought it to us obviously to build a subscription business for their archives and think that providing permalinks will undermine those efforts. I think not, but that's something to explore elsewhere.

The takeaway here is that it's blazingly obvious that we are going to have to reach kids in the media they are using and, as much as I love them, that's not newspapers or newsprint. And we are going to have to communicate with them in the style they are used to, and that's not the one-way, we-are-the-omnipotent-pontificators mode of editors, anchormen and advertisers. It will need to be, as much as it hurts my bloviating soul to adjust, a dialogue. And it will need to go beyond prescriptive words and carry illuminating visuals.