What They Are Saying About: The Future of The Capital Times
Submitted by Jesse Russell on Tue, 2008-04-29 12:40.
Current | Media | WTASA
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The First Law of Technology says that "with every change in technology that affects consumer behavior, we always overestimate the impact in the short term, but then underestimate the full impact over the long term."
I have personally stayed fairly quiet on what is going on at Capital Newspapers because I want to see the product they plan on turning out before I decide if I should throw stones or flowers. I regret the loss of any print publication, but am very intrigued by the Cap Times tactic for survival. They seem, in my humble opinion formed through the three years we have successfully kept dane101 running and my media studies, to be carefully estimating the future by not completely giving up on the past (the print pubs), but cautiously adjusting for the increasingly unpredictable future. Change hurts, but it is often a necessity. As for what everyone else is saying, we might as well start with the newspaper numbers that were released on the same day TCT ceased publication. From RacinePost:
In Madison, the Wisconsin State Journal went from 143,512 to 138,276 on Sunday, a loss of 5,236; its combined daily circulation with the Capital Times went from 106,174 to 104,265, a loss of 1,909. The bittersweet news from Madison this weekend, as the 90-year-old CapTimes published its final edition, is that the WSJ reports retaining all of the CapTimes' 14,000 afternoon subscribers to its morning edition.
Jeff Jarvis gives accolades:
Bravo, I say. This is the kind of bold move the American newspaper industry should have made five years ago, when they easily could have foreseen this future. The public is online, the new means of gathering and sharing news is online, the medium is more efficient and cheaper to run, the old business model is shot. Why wait?
Tech Observer writes:
Anything that jars the newspaper industry into thinking differently should be celebrated. The one hopeful note is that sometimes companies truly reinvent themselves only when they're standing on a cliff with a fire burning behind them. Wonder if the fire's hot enough yet.
Mark Potts adds:
The Cap Times isn't a major newspaper by any stretch, but it's taking the lead in a transition I suspect we'll see more of in the next (very) few years. (In some ways, it's already underway overseas.) Those ongoing declines in circulation and revenue are going to force print newspapers to come to grips with their future, and in many cases, that future will be online. And only online.
Mr. Verb sees a great deal of promise on the first day of no TCT:
My initial reaction was that we were basically losing an important voice locally, but talking to people, I've heard some say that they've already transitioned to reading it on-line and the CapTimes looks like they're serious about making this work.
Yesterday morning, right at the transition, they ran this editorial about a controversy over the pledge of allegiance in the Edgerton schools (that's a town southeast of here, within the county). Classic CapTimes, tied to Wisconsin's best traditions, and relevant to language. Silicon Valley Insider makes a whole bunch of weird calculations and comes to the conclusion that the move will help TCT tap into the $42 billion in ad revenue no longer flowing to newspapers.
* As financial and environmental pressures increase and a better grasp of reality sets in, more papers will opt to do what the Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, did last weekend: Shut down their print businesses, fire a third of their staff, and put what's left online.
Just An Online Minute takes an interesting look at the positives for TCT:And good riddance--if not to the staff, at least to papers. And a hearty welcome to a slightly cleaner atmosphere and less need for recycling.[/url]
it’s not surprising that an afternoon paper like The Capital Times would fold in print. Afternoon dailies have been fading away for decades, victims of evening TV news broadcasts and cable TV long before the Internet struck a death blow.
Local blogger DekeRivers thinks he is in a minority (you aren't!)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. And even the Madison newspaper isn’t completely abandoning print; it will still publish a free print newsweekly and a free weekly entertainment guide.
I know I am one of the minority that still loves the smell of the printed newspaper and the ink that it leaves on my fingers after a read. I still am one of those who love to take it with me to the coffee shop or the yard to read at my leisure. I am a dwindling number of folks who still clip articles and send them to friends and relatives with a note attached.
Mr. Dilettante sees the move from paper to web as less of an industry trend, but more of an issue of content:
Madison is still a lefty place but especially on the west side of town the populace tends to be affluent and less inclined to subscribe to the oppositional leftism that the Cap Times has long pushed.
Bull Moose Strikes Back misses the bigger picture for the politics and ignorantly says the independently owned Isthmus is owned by the Village Voice:
Good riddance to Madison’s Capital Times. Another lefty political rag posing as a legitimate source of unbiased news bites the dust. Now Madison will have to make due with the only slightly left of center daily Wisconsin State Journal and the Village Voice (enough said) owned weekly Isthmus. It warms the heart to see that a rag like the Cap Times, which was founded to counter the patriotism of World War I, can’t even survive in the People’s Republic of Madison anymore.
Jay Mundy can see past the editorial position of the paper and understands the bigger picture:
Regardless of its editorial stance - yet another paper is gone.
And that's a sad thing. And today's ABC numbers (posted earlier on JayMundy.com) show major circulation declines in 23 out of 25 America's largest papers. It can only be a hope that good journalism continues--in whatever form--for as long as we tree-cutting humans continue our time here on Earth. The Daily Phosdex writes:
Nonetheless, Wisconsin's Progressive Voice needed to move with the times in the face of overzealous and unhealthy conservative dominance of the Mainstream Media. And what better medium than the Information Stuporbahn to keep The Capital Times going?
Still, though, the whole needs to be worth watching to see if The Capital Times can continue its Progressive agenda online as much as it did on newsprint. Letter From Here is not hopeful:
so many people have taken voluntary or involuntary severance packages that, under the best of circumstances, it won't be the same paper. And, really, who ever spends more than a few minutes a day with even the best internet newspapers? Millions of people read newspapers online -- but a lot of that traffic is search engine driven, and most gets funneled right to the big national dailies with their multimillion-dollar websites.
More Info Than Brains echoes those sentiments:
What do you do when there is more information out there than there are qualified brains to produce it? Apparently, you increase the information while firing 30% of your brains.
Jay Rosen has a number of tips, including:
if I were those guys, one of the skills I would immediately try to master is aggregating local news better (and faster) than anyone aggregates local news. But the Isthmus is already very good at that, while Dane101 produced a first-rate account of the shift at the Capital Times— better than the paper’s own.
Race Talk writes:
Newspapers need to deal with a startling fact: the print edition isn’t the product. It’s a channel for news delivery. Once they realize that the product is the news – and start delivering it the way people want it (online, mobile, video, audio, text, RSS, etc.) the better off newspapers will be. They can win the news delivery wars – but only if they stop with the defeatist attitudes.
What does Nancy Nall have to say about the future of TCT? Simply:
Very very murky.
SoundBiteTrack responds:
while The Capital Times may indeed have a "very, very murky" future, as Nall suggests, one thing's certain: any change is better than standing still, hoping things will get better. Because unless the newspaper industry makes some serious changes, AdAge's "Newspaper Death Watch" may outlast the medium itself.
Blogflict says it is a "sign of the times":
These are hard times for parts of Wisconsin. The lead story in the Capital Times when this blog was written was on a GM announcement to layout 3,500 employees, including 750 in a local town. But unlike GM, the owners of The Capital Times should not be pitted but praised. Their decision gives them an exciting opportunity to be part of the future of journalism. Perhaps many years from now we’ll remember the Capital Times as an early adapter to the changes in media
Donni Greenburg lists a number of positives. Here are some of them:
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. |
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