Can newspapers lure Gen Y with games?

Since its original release, The Matrix
has become a multimedia franchise.

I probably should have watched "The Matrix" the last time it was on TV. Or maybe I need to start reading comic books, particularly the superhero variety. Or perhaps I should become a gamer.

Then, apparently, I'd have a better understanding of transmedia storytelling, a phrase that has surfaced at a couple of recent journalism conferences.

First coined in the 1990s, it refers to the use of different media platforms to convey information, each contributing something to give greater context and depth to understanding the whole.

At the South by Southwest bash in March and at the American Society of News Editors annual meeting last week, the phrase came up in a kind of shorthand as gaming -- or a way to lure a younger generation to your newspaper and website through news games.

What the heck?! The scold in me, the one who embraces a daily diet of eat-your-spinach journalism, wanted nothing to do with adding sugar to make the news more palatable to Gen Y, the college-aged kids who are less likely than other generations to get their news from print.

But that's an uncharitable view.

Jeremy Littau, an assistant professor of journalism at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., describes the light bulb that went off