The NY Times covers the decision by Madison Wisconsin’s daily paper, The Capital Times, to go online only:
On Saturday, The Capital Times, the city’s fabled 90-year-old daily newspaper founded in response to the jingoist fervor of World War I, stopped printing to devote itself to publishing its daily report on the Web.
(The staff will also produce two print products: a free weekly entertainment guide inserted in the crosstown paper, The Wisconsin State Journal, and a news weekly that will be distributed with the paper.)
The company also owns the URL Madison.com.
This was a small daily and but it’s not the first example of this, nor will it be the last. However, unless this becomes the dominant destination in Madison, the company will be challenged to replace its print revenues online. Different pricing models that require lots of traffic to create meaningful revenue make it tough — although it will continue to print weekly publications.
Papers also will need to pursue a range of new services (e.g., online marketing) on behalf of advertisers, as well as do creative things such as join or form (local) ad networks (see Adify). Still this may be a wise decision on the paper’s part and may well represent the fate of many more publications.
Ideally both a traditional publication and online destinations (plural) would be owned and operated by newspaper publishers.
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Related: US newspaper circulation falls 3.6% in the past six months. A few papers, including USAToday and the WSJ reported very modest gains.
