Comments on Daily Paper to Become Free Weekly

Maybe the Onion is going daily in Madison, its hometown. There isn't much of a market for actual news in Madison...

a sign of things to come for all dailies.

Wasn't Madison kind of small to have two dailies? Way less than half the size of Seattle -- with a fifth of the metro area.

It was bound to happen. I doubt the Cap Times is going anywhere -- as I recall, their JOA has no out clause, and they split profits 50-50 with the State Journal, but their circulation was about 1/10th of the State Journal. It sounds like a business decision.

I'm sad to hear this. Milwaukee's Journal and Sentinel combined a few years back, and now this.

Fnarf, yes, Madison's a small market relatively, but two papers worked pretty well there because it's the state capital and has a large university, not to mention that both papers served as the daily paper for many of the small communities all the way west to the Mississippi. It's a big newspaper area, as opposed to getting news via TV and online, though I suspect the online part is what precipitated the Cap Times' decline.

P.S. The Onion staff actually isn't in Madison any more. They moved to NYC back in 2001.

With only one paper, who will compete to be the first to alert us to impending ice quakes (http://www.news.wisc.edu/14680), the 100 car pile-up in a wall of fog, thousands stranded on I90 with the National Guard on snowmobiles, break-throughs in creating stem cells from a source other than embryos? Madison's a happening place...