Web-Only? In THAT Outfit?

Matt Pulle’s column “Desperately Seeking the News” in the Nashville Scene this week may reek of petty sniping between former colleagues, but if you can wade through all the posturing about how much money each paper earns there is some surprising news located within it. The free daily newspaper in Nashville known as The City Paper is moving to a web-only presence:

Eight years after it first rolled off the presses, the free daily is positioning itself to become an online-only publication in a move that will reduce costs—and maybe threaten the paper’s limited advertiser base.

“In the not-too-distant future, that’s how most readers, particularly the ones that advertisers care about the most, are going to be getting their daily news,” he writes the Scene in an email.

Del Favero, who held the same job with aplomb at the Scene for 15 years, first hinted at his paper’s looming transition in a little-noticed trade press release in November.

“Our readers are more likely to read The City Paper at their desks in the morning. And what we found was that, increasingly, more of them were actually reading the paper online,” he said then. “Because of that online readership growth and the expense of delivering the paper each and every day, we are slowly evolving the paper from a print product to a primarily digital product.”

Aside from the rare astute editorial insight or worthwhile investigative piece, what The City Paper has to offer its readers and its advertisers is that it is free. People pick up The City Paper in coffee shops and restaurants because they want something to occupy their eyeballs while they slurp up caffeine and calories. They do not seek out The City Paper for its high-caliber journalism, fine writing or information unavailable elsewhere.

I used to read The City Paper online as part of my job as a media blogger in Middle Tennessee. It served its purpose as fodder for posts. However, I stopped reading the paper when it moved to the confusing calamity known as the E-Paper, because the new format was ugly, unfriendly to users, if not damn near impossible to navigate. For instance, this page looks great. There are paragraph breaks, relevant imagery and text large enough to read. However, this page is what is commonly called a clusterfuck. Start clicking around to see what I mean.

I have no stats or numbers or traffic reports to illustrate my belief that if the City Paper moves to the web only and does not abandon the e-paper format that they are making arrangements for their own funeral. But I am still confident that that will be the case.

I hope they prove me wrong.

Previously at Sparkwood & 21: E-tarded