elsewhere/media relations: headed for the future...

[iainpj]

nonelvis, you might want to hide the interwebs from columbina for a week or so. He's just going to get all frothy at the keyboard by the time it's all over...

Monitor shifts from print to Web-based strategy
By David Cook | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
posted October 28, 2008 at 1:30 p.m. EDT

The Monitor Ends Daily Print Edition - NYTimes.com
By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD
October 29, 2008

Media Relations: headed for the future...
The question is, how likely and how soon will other newspapers switch to this option? The Monitor is in a unique position; not only is it non-profit, but it's also a national daily. There are really only three or four of those published in the US: the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the International Herald-Tribune, and the Monitor are the only ones I can think of offhand -- and the Herald-Tribune is, as the name states, "international"; its primary audience, despite content that comes in large part from the NY Times (when did IHT start billing itself as "the global edition of the New York Times"?), really is almost entirely outside the United States. Of those four, I can't imagine the WSJ shifting to a primarily online delivery method any time soon; too many of its clients are "old business", let's call it, and really want a paper to give them an authoritative view, with online as a supplement for regular updating of certain stories and topics as needed. USA Today ... well, possibly. It does have a certain amount of online-only content, and to be honest, I have only very infrequently touched or even seen a physical copy of the paper in the last few years. I suspect their ad model might not hold up with that shift, however. The one I'm really curious about is the Herald-Tribune. with almost no domestic audience to worry about, depending on what the circulation, subscription and revenue figures are overseas, they're the other one of the four national dailies that can afford to tinker a bit.

Of the non-national dailies, the ones I might expect to go completely online next would be the mid-major sized newspapers, the ones for mid-sized cities, or the ones that are clearly the number two paper in a two paper town. As the article mentions, "the Capital Times in Madison, Wis. went online only, and The Daily Telegram in Superior, Wis., announced it would publish online except for two days a week"; you might expect to see papers like the Albuquerque Journal or the Tulsa Herald -- the only two successful online subscription dailies in the country -- or something like the Philadelphia Daily News or the Chicago Sun-Times to be the next ones to take the leap. For many of them, it's not going to be so much a choice for the bright shining future as a "what else have we got left to try? what else do we have to lose?" gambit.

What intrigues me a bit is one little nugget buried in the article, mentioned only in passing...

Comments

[nonelvis]

Him and me both. It will be a sad day when I can't open up a printed newspaper to read with my breakfast.