There's been a death in the family -- my family of the newspaper world, that is. Another afternoon newspaper, the Cincinnati Post, has printed its last edition:
The Post and its sister Kentucky Post edition have been struggling for decades, part of a national decline in afternoon newspapers and of multiple daily newspapers in U.S. cities. E.W. Scripps Co., based in Cincinnati, decided in July to close The Post newspapers when a joint operating agreement with Gannett Co. expired at the end of 2007.
In a story in Monday's editions headlined "Web site to carry on Post tradition," The Post reported that the Scripps company will keep a Kentucky presence with kypost.com. The site beginning Tuesday will supersede the current Post site and will share content with the Scripps-owned Cincinnati TV station WCPO-TV and its Web site.
One Post staffer, Kerry Duke, will stay on as the site's managing editor. The site will also use a full-time reporter, freelance journalists and contributions from "citizen journalists" in addition to WCPO and news services. The site will focus on the three counties just across the Ohio River, the northern Kentucky area where the majority of The Post newspapers' last subscribers have been.
It will interesting to see how the Web site works out, but I think "the brand" is gone; kypost.com, one site among millions, won't have quite the mytique of that stack of papers that used to clutter up the living room.
This is sad:
"We're going to make ourselves count right to the end," he said earlier. The staff must then turn to myriad tasks of shutting down, such as cleaning out drawers, turning in laptops and keys, processing paperwork and turning off phones.
