The Capital Times
February 7, 2008
The decision to stop publishing a print version of the Capital Times, save for a free news and op-ed section every Wednesday and a free culture section every Thursday, seems to bode ill for the future of Madison’s news industry.
The Capital Times is a solid little newspaper, and I hope their online-only format allows them to succeed. But they’ve been trapped in a more vicious manifestation of the same feedback cycle that has decimated many other bigger and more prestigious newspapers. Declining circulation results in fewer resources, which means less muckraking and in-depth reporting. That makes it hard for them to provide news and information that can’t be found elsewhere, and so more people allow their subscriptions to elapse.
Technological changes have made it unnecessary for local newspapers to carry truncated wire reports of national and world news, and no one will miss those. But what can’t necessarily be found elsewhere is comprehensive coverage of state and local government, local sports, etc. The New York Times doesn’t care about the ups and downs of the UW’s football recruiting, or the details of a state smoking ban, or who’s bribing who in the state legislature.
Investigating those stories takes work. No one has yet discovered a business model that can pay for the reporters and the shoe leather and the time commitments necessary to demand transparency in the state house and on the city council, while giving away their content for free on a website.
That’s not to say it can’t be done, but in a business with tight margins and little room for error, a successful newspaper can no longer be a jack-of-all-trades. It will have to know its market, marshall its resources carefully, and stay focused on the things that make a local newspaper worth having.
February 7th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
The Cap Times has been in a weird pissing match with the WSJ for a while now, and it looks like they have lost. This weird thing where they both fight to be the first to get the “breaking news” on the madison.com website, as well as duplicating the same news stories with a different spin has to have taken their eyes off the ball. It’s too bad. I’m aware the pm paper slot has been shot for years, but really, who reads a “paper” anymore anyway?
February 7th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Yeah, the fight to “break” a story about, say, the weather, is pretty silly.
Back in Ye Olden Days of Yore, I’m sure that sort of thing was an integral part of the newspaper culture, but these days, when TCT and WSJ are owned by the same parent company, share a printing press, coordinate distribution times, etc, it doesn’t make much sense.
It does seem to represent a failure to understand the strengths of good newspaper reporting, inasmuch as a newspaper can’t compete with online and TV news sources for immediacy, and is probably better off focusing on accuracy and depth rather than speed. After all, the television news never wins the Pulitzer, and no one talks about being the TV newscast of record.
February 7th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
Yet when they did cover similar stories, the differences were interesting. I remember the story of the “principal killer” and the WSJ was all sensational whereas TCT was an objective analysis of the different sides of the story.
I do hope they are serious about their online presence. I certainly expect more than is available currently. I would have subscribed if they offered PDF. I just refuse to subscribe to a paper edition with all that wasted paper.
February 8th, 2008 at 10:09 am
I was a subscriber of the CT for about 35 years. Lately, though…It was clear that the paper was fading. What I noticed was the increasing pile of unopened papers sitting on my table. I thought about that for a while and concluded that immediacy is something that is difficult to do with a dead-tree paper. All of the national/regional news in the front section I had read already online. The editorial columns were all 3 days old by the time they had reached the paper. I had long since read them online, too. The only reason that I read the paper anymore was for local editorials, news and, of course, the obits. I was seriously thinking of canceling my subscription the day before this announcement came out.
The CT has long been resting on it’s laurels and worshiping at the shrine of Bill Evjue. It was a classic crusading liberal paper in the heyday of Evjue and Miles McMillian. The Zweiful era was a long gradual slide toward blandness, where it has settled now.
I agree with Henry that the CT online presence is now pretty poor. If they are indeed serious about making that work better, with a decent format and a lot more local content, it could work. More headline clips from channel 15’s newscasts is not necessarily the answer. Something Huffington Post-like may work well, assuming they have the horses to pull it off. Doing an on-line effort is not at all the same as a dead-tree one…