The Capital Times Moves From Print to Online

Kim Pearson — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:21:17 -0500

For US newspaper industry, the first of what could be many shoes has
dropped. With declining circulation and ad revenues, it's been
expected that some daily newspapers were going to have to
abandon print altogether. That's just about happened at Madison, Wisconsin's Capital Times which published its last daily print edition last Saturday.

After 90 years as an afternoon daily, the Cap Times will run its news online, with a two weekly print supplements to the Wisconsin State Journal. A news and opinion digest will come out on Tuesdays, and and arts and entertainment tabloid will appear on Thursdays. About 20 staffers lost their jobs during the transition.

Dave Blaska went to the paper's farewell celebration and posted a fond remembrance of the Cap Times in its heyday:

I grew up with the paper. Dad would lie on the couch and
read the comics to us as little kids. I remember the Green Sheet: "Priscilla's
Pop" and "Our Boarding House" with Major Hoople.

Dad would pound the table over something he had read in the
CT. That is when I learned that newspapers were something important.

The Demise of Print blog marked the milestone with an entry titled: "RIP: The Capital Times." But a Cap Times editorial argued that the change was not a death, but a transformation:

Today
marks our last edition as a traditional daily newspaper of the sort
Americans knew in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Starting tomorrow, The Capital Times will be
a daily newspaper of the sort Americans will know in the 21st
century....

Our purpose is [founder Wiliam J.] Evjue's purpose: We want to
ensure that Madison, Dane County and Wisconsin have an independent
voice for peace and economic and social justice that speaks truth
to power each and every day.

Noting that the CapTimes' paid circulation had dropped to about 16,000 from a high of 47,000 a few years ago, Staci Kramer said management made the change rather than fade into oblivion. Afternoon papers have been closing for years now, so it's possible that this transition to the web saved a publication that might have disappeared altogether as Wendy Davis at Just an Online Minute observed:

In fact, in some ways, The Capital Times’ shift to the Internet
is good news. Before the advent of the Web, evening papers simply
closed and didn’t resurface in other forms.

Of course, that's cold comfort to the 20 staff members who are now out of work, and it's contributed to a general climate of gloom that's affected many a journalist. Amy Gahran says a lot of journalists need an attitude adjustment:

Even though despair is a natural result of prolonged fear and
difficulty -- when too many people in any culture are in despair, that
culture can easily become toxic (overwhelmingly negative to the point
of becoming self-destructive or self-defeating).

Since it's widely accepted that many other newspapers will go the way of the Cap Times, Jay Rosen says this experiment may forecast the shape of news outlets to come:

I see a web-to-print play aborning, to me a wise try. Plus they aced
the distribution part of the exam: new tabs inserted into the morning
daily, the Wisconsin State Journal,
which in turn gains circulation from the demise of the afternoon paper,
putting the ex-afternoon paper’s weeklies into way way more homes than
the fading daily ever reached: 17,000 compared to 104,000 in the new
arrangement. For the Cap Times it’s a brand new public to inform.
Potential influence has been expanded. The journalism has to change,
and no one knows how yet.

By the way, the Cap Times isn't the first newspaper to make this shift. In a Jan, 2007 post for BlogHer, I reported that the world's oldest newspaper, The Post and Domestic Newspapers, had become a section of the website of the Swedish Companies Registration Office. At that time Tish G commented:

[T]he thing is, we have a massive disparity in internet access betweeen the
cities and the countryside that could make full digitiation of a major
newspaper in the U.S. an absolute disaster.

Let's hope Tish's prediction doesn't come true, because for better or worse, this looks like the future.

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The Capital Times Moves From Print to Online