State of newspapers
Walter Hussman, taking time out from running the Little Rock Public Schools, writes a commentary piece for the Wall Street Journal's on-line edition explaining that newspapers are "cannibalizing" themselves by offering free news, criticizing the AP for allowing Yahoo and Google and MSN to subscribe and bragging on himself for having subscription-only news for the Dem-Gaz on-line, and for using the on-line edition to tease, or, as he says, complement rather than cannibalize the paper product. He says we've made news a ubiquitous commodiity, and that that's a mistake. Actually, you can still get a lot of the D-G news free by going through nwanews.com, the Northwest Arkansas alliance with the Northwest Arkansas Times and Benton County Daily Record. And I have found myself weaned from Hussman's Little Rock paper product, mainly because the Arkansas Times blog tells me everything I need to know (immediately and with savvy attitude) about local news and I get national and international news elsewhere. The only things the D-G has locally that the Times blog doesn't are obituaries and local columnists who haven't managed to become required reading. But that's just me. There's a company I know of — well, I work for it — that seems to think the future viability of the paper product (well, at least one form of future viability) is in small towns and mid-sized towns where there are no on-line options for community news. It is interesting that while newspapers everywhere lost circulation in the recent cycle, three that gained were the D-G and the Stephens' ones in Northwest Arkansas and Fort Smith. You can almost always count on Arkansas to be different.