There’s a notice over at Gannett’s Sheboygan Press that they will be moving their stories’ comments to Facebook. Two quick observations. First, comments on Facebook are not anonymous, and the publisher surely (and correctly) hopes that this will moderate the comments posted. Since a private paper is free to publish some comments, no comments, or…

Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for the American West offers a series of essays and an interactive chart on the growth of newspapers in America since the late seventeenth century. All the essays are informative.  Embedded below is a video that illustrates newspapers’ expansion, across the centuries, across this continent. The Growth of US Newspapers,…

Across the state, four major newspaper concerns exert significant influence over news and opinion: Lee’s Wisconsin State Journal, Journal Communications’ Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Gannett’s local papers scattered mostly across central Wisconsin, and the Capital Newspapers (publishers of The Capital Times and now WisPolitics, WisOpinion, etc.) Capital Newspapers may seem a surprising inclusion, as their afternoon…

There are three traditional newspapers in these parts: the Whitewater Register, the Daily Union, and the Janesville Gazette (online as the GazetteXtra and a Walworth County edition, WalworthCountyToday). I’ve written about these papers before, most recently last fall. (See, Whitewater-Area Newspapers, Fall 2010.) They’re not the only news, the only papers, or the only websites; they’re…

Like millions of others, I grew up in a newspaper-reading family. A family would have several papers, morning or afternoon, at a time when afternoon dailies were still common (and commonly profitable). One read almost every part of the paper, and the names of reporters, editors, and publishers were well-known to readers. So one would…

You’ve probably noticed that  AOL’s Patch.com is flourishing across southeastern Wisconsin, with sixteen cities having that hyper-local website model, among hundreds of Patch.com websites across America.  Wisconsin’s current Patch websites offer local news, respectively, for these communities: Brookfield, Caledonia, Fox Point-Bayside, Greendale,Greenfield, Hudson, Menomonee Falls, Mount Pleasant-Sturtevant, Muskego, Oak Creek, Port Washington-Saukville, Shorewood, Sussex, Waukesha, Wauwatosa, and Whitefish Bay.) A New York Times about Patch from January 2011 notes that…