A press shuts down in Appleton, and in a sad way, it's called progress

The second edition of the Appleton Crescent, Feb. 25, 1853.

A daily newspaper will not be printed today in Appleton, Wisconsin, for the first time in more than 165 years.

Well, sort of. The P-C printed for a day or two in Milwaukee during a massive power outage in August 2013.

But aside from that, including today's edition (April 29, 2018), The Post-Crescent and its predecessors had been printed in Appleton since February 1853.

The Crescent's front page, Feb. 25, 1853.
That's when the Ryan brothers — Samuel, James and John — formed The Appleton Crescent, a paper based on their Democratic philosophies.

The Appleton Motor was formed in August 1859 as a Republican counter to The Crescent, and changed its name to The Appleton Post in 1887.

The Post-Crescent was formed on Feb. 10, 1920, when the former rivals merged.

Today's editions of The P-C were printed overnight at Gannett's Appleton Production Facility, and then the presses were turned off, for better or worse. Gannett has owned The P-C since July 21, 2000.

Future editions of The P-C, Green Bay Press-Gazette, Wausau Daily Herald and other Gannett newspapers in Wisconsin will be printed in a newer, faster production facility in the Milwaukee area, and trucked back to their communities for distribution.

The final P-C printed in Appleton,
Sunday, April 29, 2018.
Recent columns from their top editors have acknowledged that those products are — and will be — different than what longtime print subscribers used to take for granted. Most of the change is to  accommodate earlier deadlines, which are needed when printing a couple hours away at a facility that handles 11 daily papers.

I don't know what the Ryan brothers would have thought about this. I also don't know that it matters.

Page design and production has been handled in Des Moines, Iowa since 2011. News gathering and printing operations have been a networked collaboration to some extent since the mid-1990s, but both have ramped up considerably since 2008.

The Ryan brothers did what they thought was right in an era with few options for informing the masses of what was happening in their community. And it was successful.

Today, the options for journalism and informing communities are plenty and varied, and success and failure have just as many definitions.

It wasn't long ago — from 2003 to 2007 — that The P-C printed and published weekday morning AND afternoon editions in Appleton.

Today, that's just a memory. Not a necessity.
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I haven't read a daily print-edition newspaper on a regular basis since July 3, 2014.

That was my last day of employment at The Post-Crescent, where I was honored to work for 28.5 years, the final seven as executive editor.

But even for several years before that, reading the print edition was my second option.

Like a lot of people, I went online first for my news.

I've never shed a tear for the decline of the printed edition. Far better digital methods have been developed for distributing information, and I like them better. More importantly, many news consumers use those methods, and many more will follow that path.

Reporting news of President Lincoln's assassination
in the far-left column, April 15, 1865.
Online distribution is faster and more accessible for breaking-news stories. It's not held up — sometimes for a day or more — by snowstorms and tornadoes and power outages and rare press-breakdown issues.

In many ways, digital journalism can be presented and displayed better than its print version (check out The Washington Post's iPad app for a wonderful user experience), and when good video is included in the presentation, story-telling is greatly enhanced.

Despite the proliferation and rapid improvement of digital journalism, print is somehow often considered as a medium for more thoughtful, more complete and deeper news coverage. That assessment is a disservice to the quality of enterprise and investigative work done on a digital platform.

Digital travels with you, with updated stories, links to related stories, access to other published works, and the ever-present utility of doing your own real-time research.

By virtually every measurement of news consumption — with the exception of ink-stained fingers —  journalism on a digital platform is a superior product to journalism in a print edition.

The day after Pearl Harbor, Dec. 8, 1941.
That's not to say there aren't issues with the digital experience. Oh, my god. Pop-up ads and "takeover" ads make the simple act of swiping or scrolling through content an exercise in futility, if not abject anger.

I get it. It's a business. Advertising is necessary for the advertiser and for the company selling ad space to support journalism. No argument there.

But if the placement of ads causes consumers to abandon the site — or simply not want to be annoyed by it — it's probably a fool's errand.

That said, I don't see the metrics, and I don't know if those intrusive ads have had a negative effect on The P-C's online readership.

And maybe that's overstating the case, or ignoring a more important matter.

Because I meet a lot of people who remember me from my P-C days, and about 75 percent of them talk wistfully about how the daily paper has shrunk, how there's not as much local news in it, and how they have to have "something in their hands" when they go through the daily ritual of getting information about their community.

They tell me they want to hold a local newspaper, and turn the pages. And they wish there were more pages, with more local content.

There are reasons why that's unlikely.
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 One of my first journalism bosses, Green Bay News-Chronicle news editor John Doyle, very quickly put my professional life in proper perspective: "Flannery, to be a newspaper reporter, you need two things: You need to know how to type, and you need a job at a newspaper."

There's a lot of 1980s truth in John's words, and I was living proof of them.

The day after the stock market crash, Oct. 29, 1929.
John's words wouldn't hold water today, though; today's journalists need much more than basic typing skills, given the news media landscape, the need to publish on multiple platforms with multiple purposes and multiple audiences, the occasional need to produce still images and video to accompany the story's text, and the requirement to cover as many disparate stories as possible within a 40-hour week.

In some ways, comparing my experiences to those of today's young journalists is an apples vs. oranges exercise.

In other, more basic ways, it's exactly the same — you cover stories, you meet people, you try to put news and events and stories into proper context in your role as responsible witness for your audience, and you do it all over again countless times.
Lately, I've been thinking about the days in 1998 and 1999 when The P-C launched its website. We posted about three or four stories a day, and in the site's first couple years, I sent those stories to a Thomson Newspapers team in Winnipeg, Canada.

Thomson, based in Toronto, owned The P-C from 1984-2001.

Just moving the stories to Canada took a long time — broadband wasn't common 20 years ago —  and they usually weren't posted online until the next day.

The night before this Jan. 18, 2000
edition, we'd broken the story
on our new website about the Packers
hiring of head coach Mike Sherman.
Our staff had trepidation about posting content online before it was published in print. "We'll be killing ourselves" by giving it away before print customers paid for it, and more importantly, by giving it to our TV/radio/print competition before we could capitalize on it for our own commercial purposes.
  
The first major story we broke online was the Jan. 18, 2000 hiring of new Packers coach Mike Sherman. We wanted to post the story before the 6 p.m. local TV newscasts, so that the stations would have to report that "The Post-Crescent" and "postcrescent.com" broke the story. We barely made it.

A lot of great and not-so-great (re: photo galleries from Fox Cities bars) work has been done online over the past 20 years, a time of previously unthinkable technological change.

Somewhat understandably, the newspaper industry did a horrible job of understanding how to leverage the internet.

Over the centuries, there have been precious few other major developments — the development of the movable type printing press in 1439 and the 20th century development of television and radio — as a means for informing large communities of people.

The internet makes both of those previous developments almost moot. And there was almost no way to prepare for it.

And in a very real way, that's why The P-C and its owners have taken multiple steps to control costs, wherever and however possible.
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There was a time — again, not long ago — when a local newspaper was the hub of a community. For example, if you were running for public office, you needed that connection, and the ability to let prospective voters know where you stand on the issues.

If your organization was hosting a fund-raiser, you needed a lot of people to see the details.

If your local business wanted more business, you needed to advertise.

If your son or daughter was a star athlete, star musician or star student, you wanted to clip the story about the team, the personal profile, or the coverage of their event or game.

Monday, Jun 21, 1969.
If you had something to sell or rent, or wanted a job or a new home, you used or scoured the classified ads.

If you lived in a small town or a major city, you counted on coverage of local government, local schools, local business and industry.

If you were interested in things-to-do and places-to-go calendars, those were available.

The newspaper was almost all things to almost all people.

In the wake of the 2008-2009 economic collapse, some of those things were scaled back, or reconfigured. Like covering government meetings. Like calendars of community events. Like local editorials. Like local sports.

It's easy to see that some of those decisions were necessarily financially driven. and done to protect stockholder value, because in that economic free-fall, things weren't pretty. And at the same time, much of the advertising that had supported print journalism virtually disappeared.

In the summer of 2007, The Sunday Post-Crescent published 32-40 pages of solid classified advertising EVERY week. Less than two years later, a Sunday P-C had 6-10 pages of classified ads, and that's still the case.

Other days of the week were hit just as hard.

Realtors focused on their own websites, rather than spend on print. Many auto dealers followed suit. Employment ads went online, too, and Craigslist (and other free websites) killed the "For Sale" market for goods and cars.

Advertising decreased in a large way, aided and abetted by liberally giving away valuable content online.

That's what emaciated the newspaper. Not a perceived liberal or conservative bias. Not too much focus on pro sports or prep sports, or not enough focus on politics or religion. Not stories that were too long or headlines that had a typo.

The assassination of President Kennedy, Nov. 22, 1963.
Newspaper publishing is a for-profit business, and it was deeply wounded by the economic downturn.

So, now going on 10 years, finding "efficiencies" has been a full-time mission. It costs money to run a press, to purchase newsprint, to buy and store ink, to employ press operators and contract with truck drivers, and to keep press facilities open.

Why operate 11 presses when one will do?

And why focus on saving print when digital is the present and the future?

Is there a more efficient method of distributing content?

Those questions are not answered in a vacuum. Each one affects other parts of the operation, and accommodations must be made.

If you have less space to devote to high school sports coverage, you need fewer people to cover high school sports, for example. Same for entertainment coverage, government coverage, education coverage, political coverage, and environmental coverage.

All of that coverage had a very good, very stable home in The P-C, not that long ago. Or so we thought.
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Some of my best friends in life are good people who work at The P-C, and they continue to do the best jobs they can in somewhat trying circumstances.

The first of three editions, Sept. 11,
2011. I wrote the front-page editorial.
The P-C staff also produced extra
editions that day for Gannett papers
in Green Bay, Oshkosh, Fond du Lac,
Manitowoc and Sheboygan.
I realize — and so do they, by the way — that you might be struggling with changes that have been made to the newspaper.

Please understand that the people who work at 306 W. Washington St., are not the owners of the franchise, and that they might make different decisions if they were.

But it's just not possible to turn back the hands of time.

You can't buy a new black-and-white TV today, either.

Bob Hope is dead, the Braves haven't called Milwaukee home since 1965, and, somehow, Donald Trump is our president.

We might change all of those facts if we could. But we can only cope with what happened, not what we would have preferred.

The P-C is no longer printed in Appleton, and at some point down the road, it might not be printed anywhere.

You'll have digital options for getting information about your town, and as time marches on, you'll read someone's fond (and online-only) remembrance of a 10-year-old kid throwing the paper on the front porch, or leaving it in the driveway, or being unable to find it anywhere.

You'll smile in remembrance, and you'll swipe to your TV app, and watch the Packers vs. Patriots in a future Super Bowl from the comfort of a beach lounge chair.

Because you can already do that today.

Times have changed. The Ryan boys might be impressed.