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Stop the presses; start the computers
By Doni Greenberg
Did you hear about The Capital Times, an afternoon daily paper in Madison, Wis.?
The 90-year-old newspaper dumped its print edition and became an online-only newspaper.
How much longer before all newspapers permanently stop the presses and start reporting 100-percent online?
Who would blame them?
For example, here at the nimble-and-quick Food for Thought we have no worries of rising paper costs.
We have no worries of buying tanker cars full of ink.
We have no worries about propping up aging, nearly obsolete presses.
We have no worries about climbing gas prices and the increased transportation costs to lug truck-loads of papers to increasingly fewer subscribers.
We have no worries about sending money to some money-eating corporate giant.
Online stories can run as many column inches as necessary to report the news.
Online stories soar high above static pieces of stale newspaper to deliver sound, video, links, slide shows and updates.
Online readers can interact immediately with online writers.
Online advertisers can know exactly how many readers saw their ads.
Online’s elasticity stretches around the globe and pulls us close.
Online, the world is our newsroom; e-volving all the time.
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The Capital Times switch is an interesting event, but I wouldn’t predict a quick demise of print. In my working career, I was often surprised at how long it took for an obviously superior technology to displace an entrenched inferior one.
But the pressures you note may cause the weakest newspapers to implode - they may not be able to make the jump to the online-only world. It will be informative to see if the Capital Times is even in business in a year.
Locally, I find it interesting that the searchlight has more paid subscribers (from the Scripps annual report) than weekly online viewers after many years of being online (http://www.quantcast.com/redding.com/traffic). This is not a good sign.
One of their partners (kaango.com) makes the case that:
…”the classified ad platforms built by and for the newspaper industry are
ill-conceived and woefully inadequate to serve the needs of an ever-growing and increasingly sophisticated Internet audience”.
Will the searchlight survive, or go the way of the Albuquerque Tribune?
Doni…I read both the paper and Redding.com. I sometimes enjoy reading the mean, nasty vindictive rantings of people about certain stories. Hiding behind psydo names, these natives pull no punches in complaints about city hall, the homeless, Turtle Bay, Eagles, drunk drivers. legalizing pot and Christy Lochire.
I think newspaper will still be unloading barrels of ink and rolls of paper for a while until advertisers start leaving for the internet. We still have a large population of older folks who don’t have and don’t want a computor. They want to sit down and read the fish wrap while spilling coffee all over it. They need their daily obits to see if they’re still here and to see if any friends have passed on to the great devide. I kid the seniors because I’m one. I’ve been on computors for several years but still like to have a paper in my hand while I spill coffee and burn holes in it.
While I agree that the online format has many advantages, if given the choice I’d still prefer a quality local “paper.” Perhaps I’m old-fashioned, but holding the paper in my hands is still quite visceral — bringing back memories of childhood newspaper sword fights or the long winter nights where yesterday’s newspaper was sacrificed to help start the evening fire.