Madison loses afternoon newspaper

On Saturday, The Capital Times, the fabled 90-year-old daily newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin, 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 Madison’s remaining daily newspaper, The Wisconsin State Journal, and a news weekly that will be distributed with the paper.

The paper’s circulation dropped to about 18,000 from a high in the 1960s of more than 40,000.

“We felt our audience was shrinking so that we were not relevant,” Clayton Frink, the publisher of The Capital Times, said in an interview two days before the final daily press run. “We are going a little farther, a little faster, but the general trend is happening everywhere.”

The transition in Madison, while long foretold — The Capital Times was doubly part of a dying breed, being the afternoon paper in a two-newspaper town — has hardly been neat and clean and cathartic.

More than 20 members of the newsroom staff lost their jobs, mainly through buyouts, but also through layoffs. Each departing journalist was profiled in the final paper, and lives on at the Web site Madison.com under the headline “A Fond Farewell to Talented Colleagues,” with a “class photo” taken next to the presses.

The new staff total will be in the 40s. This includes seven new hires in areas like Web producing and arts coverage. Copy editors, by contrast, are “exiting at a higher rate than reporters,” said Paul Fanlund, the editor who arrived from The State Journal in 2006.

Click on the headline to read the full story by New York Times staffer Noam Cohen.

You might also like to visit the section on the of website Madison.com where you will find a farewell tribute including stories on each of the individuals who posed in front of the presses of the Capital Times–some of them with 30 to 40 years of service to the newspaper.