A MEDIA PORTENT?
By Chris Daly
There's a story by the AP today that may point toward one path to a new future for news. It reports that the Capital Times of Madison, Wisc., is abandoning its print version and going mainly on-line instead. An excerpt:
MADISON, Wis. - The Capital Times, the feisty afternoon newspaper that helped define this city and championed a unique brand of Midwestern progressivism, publishes its final daily today after a colorful 90-year history.
The paper that battled Joseph McCarthy, former senator of Wisconsin, and crusaded for decades to build a Frank Lloyd Wright convention center could no longer survive after decades of circulation losses.
But the self-described champion of the little guy isn't ready to quit. Next week, the paper starts publishing two weekly tabloids and transitions its daily coverage to the Internet with a smaller staff in a first-of-its-kind move being watched closely in the industry.
Despite the gloomy, elegiac tone of the piece [who says the AP is always neutral about the news?] and its heavy reliance on quotes from readers in their 80s and 90s, the real news is that this newspaper is finding a way to survive by going entirely on-line.
As I have argued before, newspapers are at a crossroads. Part of their legacy from the 19th Century is manufacturing. Almost every newspaper is committed to manufacturing (and distributing!) a product every day. This is a giant anchor they are dragging into the 21st Century.
Newspapers are also, of course, in the information industry. In that field, almost all the work and profits are digital.
Newspapers are like the emblematic case of the folks who used to make buggy-whips for people to use in driving horses for carriages. Those buggy-whip makers never realized that they were in the transportation business. Instead, they thought they were in the horse business, and they went the way of the farrier.
There's a story by the AP today that may point toward one path to a new future for news. It reports that the Capital Times of Madison, Wisc., is abandoning its print version and going mainly on-line instead. An excerpt:
MADISON, Wis. - The Capital Times, the feisty afternoon newspaper that helped define this city and championed a unique brand of Midwestern progressivism, publishes its final daily today after a colorful 90-year history.
The paper that battled Joseph McCarthy, former senator of Wisconsin, and crusaded for decades to build a Frank Lloyd Wright convention center could no longer survive after decades of circulation losses.
But the self-described champion of the little guy isn't ready to quit. Next week, the paper starts publishing two weekly tabloids and transitions its daily coverage to the Internet with a smaller staff in a first-of-its-kind move being watched closely in the industry.
Despite the gloomy, elegiac tone of the piece [who says the AP is always neutral about the news?] and its heavy reliance on quotes from readers in their 80s and 90s, the real news is that this newspaper is finding a way to survive by going entirely on-line.
As I have argued before, newspapers are at a crossroads. Part of their legacy from the 19th Century is manufacturing. Almost every newspaper is committed to manufacturing (and distributing!) a product every day. This is a giant anchor they are dragging into the 21st Century.
Newspapers are also, of course, in the information industry. In that field, almost all the work and profits are digital.
Newspapers are like the emblematic case of the folks who used to make buggy-whips for people to use in driving horses for carriages. Those buggy-whip makers never realized that they were in the transportation business. Instead, they thought they were in the horse business, and they went the way of the farrier.
Labels: journalism's future, media, newspapers, on-line
posted by Chris Daly at 10:32 AM
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