You didn't have to watch this season's The Wire to know that times are tough for newspapers. Last Saturday, The Capital Times, a 90-year-old daily newspaper based in Madison, Wisconsin, stopped printing in order to focus on publishing its web site.
This is obviously something many newspaper executives are likely anticipating as probable futures for their own dailies.
The Times faced a major disadvantage, in being the afternoon version in a two-newspaper city, and had seen circulation drop from a high of 40,000 in the 1960s to 18,000 while the morning paper, The Wisconsin State Journal, has a circulation of 89,000.
It will continue to produce two print products which will be bundled into The State Journal: a free weekly entertainment guide and a news weekly, 77 Square.
There were 24 people who left the paper on Friday, some through buyouts and some through layoffs, and the paper took the time to profile each of them in a story titled "A Fond Farewell to Talented Colleagues."
The paper is blogging the changes to their online version here, and on that page they say:
We'd like to welcome you to our website. For many of you, visiting captimes.com is old hat. But there are new features on the horizon. We invite you veterans of captimes.com to keep an eye on the redesign blog (to the right) and give us your feedback on our progress.
Some of you are coming to our site for the first time. We are very interested in helping our long-time print subscribers make the transition to online along with us.
Monetization is the big question. While some find comfort in being able to, er, say, carry a paper into the bathroom and mull over it, many others simply get their news online. After all, web news is more timely - and free.
While large conglomerates such ahttp://technologyexpert.blogspot.com/s the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Wall Street Journal, and others may have no issues with a transtiion such as this, this could be a prime example for smaller dailies to watch, as they mull over their own futures.
Source: By Tech Ex
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