Paperless Future? - Wisconsin's Newspapers

Overtaken by the Web and battered by the recession, Wisconsin's 32 dailies are in a world of hurt.

By Marc Eisen

If you're a deep-pocketed business executive in a flourishing industry, you gather at the richly appointed Fluno Center on the UW-Madison campus for your deep-thought conferences. More modest enterprises and nonprofits send their execs to the UW's shop-worn Pyle Center for their soul-searching. This, of course, was the proper setting for a worried group of newspaper executives on March 28, 2008.


The good news was that they weren't squirreled away in a dining room at Denny's out on the Interstate. Given the parlous state of newspaper economics, this might have made more sense. Their papers might have split the cost of the $5.99 "Grand Slam" breakfast special.


"We're in a time of decline," Stephen Gray of the American Press Institute told the 60 or 70 people present. "It's a time of fear, depression, even despair." Yes, fear, depression, even despair. Nobody was shocked by Gray's words, because everybody knew they were true.

http://www.wpri.org/WIInterest/Vol18No1/Eisen18.1.html