Ms. Jennie Dorris alerted me to news about news today — the Associated Press’ youth-targeted service, “asap,” is closing shop.

Now, I’m 24. I live in New York City. I have an iPod. If you look up “hip” in the AP style guide, that’s pretty much the definition. So let me give it to you straight. I have the absolute best ideas on how to capture the youth market. Like me, the rest of the youth market is just slouching with wealth; there’s all this money that is trying as hard as it can to find its way out of our pockets, but we just don’t understand the old way of advertising and writing. It’s, like, too many words.

So here are the pitches (news nerd stuff below):

Two Truths and an Ad. The popular camp game “Two Truths and a Lie” is perfect for news services who have been pressured to display ads in new, deceiving ways.

I once talked to an ad rep for a youth publication who was really stung by his publications unwillingness to put pop-up-inspired ads in print — maybe a diagonal ad, or an exciting one in the middle of the content. Paraphrasing, now: “I thought the walls between edit and ad were going to be lower here — or gone. I thought this was going to be different.” Nope! Sucker!

But with Two Truths and an Ad, you can run a sneaky bastard of an advertisement right inline with your content. Plus, you’ve covered your ass by announcing that there’s an ad coming up. Plus, your advertisers will love it. Just think of the three consecutive headlines (and remember to stay local, local, local!):

• Council nixes fence ban
• Home Depot sells legal fences
• Fence ban supporters react

“Hey, which one’s the ad?” Suddenly, all three stories are talkers. Money in the bank! Next pitch…

Yo! Reuters Raps! Enough said. Actually, not quite enough, because there’s a reason I bring this up. And, yes, it’s a stretch.

Is it just me, or is it a little ironic that all these youth-targeted efforts start up and say that they’ve got to capture a market that has an ever-decreasing attention span, but they have to do it in a very short amount of time or quit? I mean, the memo (check it on Gawker) that asap chief Kathleen Carroll put out still measured the cutie-patootie-youth service’s age in months: 22. You know how much money I made at 22 months old? That’s right: poop.

But, uh, wouldn’t it be weird if the answers to this youth market quagmire lay somewhere in between the histories of “Yo! MTV Raps” and USA Today? I mean, how many years was it before that rag made any money? And derided though it may still be for all its charticles, graphicles and other goofballery, USA Today has a Web site that matters.

So what I’m sayin’ is, where’s Fab 5 Freddy? Maybe he can fix news for the youth, even if it’s only on weekends and only for a couple of years. Still better than 22 months.

And now comes the part where I just make stuff up as quickly as possible and one of them will actually be the wave of the future. I am fairly sure that this is the actual method through which many youth-targeted efforts take shape. Results:

• QuizQash: Every time you read three news stories on a Web site, you get a chance to take a quiz to see how well you know the information. Perfect scores earn you coupons to local or online retailers!
• No B: Every news story is written as normal, then all instances of the letter “B” are removed. What?
• BetterThan: We write a lot of stories about why we’re better than writing stories about certain topics.

Oh, but you’d like to know what I really think, behind all this sneering bullshit? (No, but here it comes anyway.) Well, I guess I think that this is my regular reading list: Gothamist.com, Esquire, The Economist (and its Web site), NYT.com, USAToday.com, SI.com and a rotation of a handful of other blogs and news sites.

I’m saying I never read an asap story — as far as I know — outside of when someone told me I should look for a job there. And I’m right in the middle of their totally unrealistic 18-34 demographic. That’s it, right? Did I get that wrong? 18-34?

So I think that the youth-targeted stuff might best be saved for places where youth is trapped (because teens, like information, want to be free). Like high school. And middle school. I haven’t watched it in an awfully long while, and I do remember being a little teenagily angsty about it at the time, but ChannelOne still seems like a good idea. Otherwise, people are going to go where they’re going to go on the Web. The only other realistic youth-targeted vessel to me at the moment is the free daily. And I went down just before the ship at one of those. Check it out — even Jarvo’s kind of on the same page as me. (Jarvo is what we kids call him.)

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