The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel had high hopes when it launched MKE four years ago – a play to crack the under-35 code, win over a notoriously non-newspaper-reading generation and profit from advertisers selling to them.
The launch, however, was met with criticism of the free weekly’s focus on soft lifestyle stories and entertainment. The scorn stung MKE staffers, who believed they took fresh approaches that were underappreciated. Conflicting visions among top editors didn’t help. But the bitterest blow came in early June when the JS announced it would fold the publication.
What went wrong?
Plenty. To begin with, MKE followed a model that has had a rocky record nationwide. It’s even happened here before: In the mid-1980s, the Milwaukee Journal launched a tabloid called Xtra to target trailing-edge baby boomers and emerging Gen-Xers. Xtra also ran aground.
But over the last five years or so, at least two dozen daily newspapers nationwide have started similar youth-oriented weekly tabs, reports Richard Karpel of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies in Washington, D.C. Nearly a third have folded – including Core Weekly, launched in late 2004 by Madison’s Capital Newspapers and killed in less than 18 months.
“They just aren’t taking off,” Karpel says. That’s because, despite industry denials, he says the wave of startups was aimed at displacing alternative weeklies like the Shepherd Expressand Madison’s Isthmus that his group represents.
Marketing-driven and conceived by corporate executives, the “faux-alts” are “about as hip as a bald guy with a ponytail,” Karpel sniffs. “If you’re trying to reach young people, inauthenticity isn’t the way to do it.”
At the Shepherd, with readership four to five times that of MKE, “We always viewed the Journal Sentinel as the competitor, not MKE,” says Publisher Louis Fortis.Nor did MKE insiders consider the unabashedly lefty Shepherd competition either. So what if MKE was “so glossy,” says one insider: “It wasn’t built to piss people off. It was built to tell you where to see a movie, what concert’s coming to town, and maybe profile somebody cool.”
If there was any target competitor, it may have been OnMilwaukee.com, the webzine that focuses on entertainment and sports with a dollop of commentary on politics and business. Yet that points to a major flaw in MKE’s execution.
“Online was an afterthought,” says Andy Vogel, formerly general sales manager at the JS online operation, Journal Interactive, and one of those involved in MKE’s startup. Journal Interactive offered “a very cutting-edge site design,” says Vogel, now the Shepherd’s vice president for advertising and online. “Nobody at MKE even gave it a second thought. It was a giant missed opportunity.”
A former contributor adds that, because it had no tech staff and depended on JS techs, “MKE was always at the bottom of the priority list.” MKE had a Web site with blogs and online features, but the paper took two years to establish an e-mail newsletter to drive traffic.
If you’re targeting the generation famous for getting its information from the Web, that’s a fatal mistake. “It’s absolutely ridiculous how it didn’t have the proper online setup,” fumes one source.
The JS apparently tried to run MKE on the cheap. The tabloid only had one ad-sales rep, insiders say, and faced complex protocols that made MKE a timid competitor for advertisers out of fear of poaching on the parent paper’s turf. So the magazine was a second-class citizen inside the corporate organization.
Some MKE insiders say the publication was in the black into the first half of 2008, but Vogel, who left the JS in 2006, says that the operation lost money in its earlier years. MKE ad managers, he says, presented incoming Publisher Elizabeth Brennerwith rosier projections than warranted to counter her opposition to the tabloid’s launch. (After initially scheduling an interview with Pressroom, Brenner declined to comment.)
Meanwhile, at the parent paper, times are ever more difficult. Even as they were killing MKE, JS executives announced another round of buyouts to cut jobs and warned layoffs might follow.
In the end, MKE’s parentage may have sealed its own fate. Corporate executives “wanted it to be its own thing, to keep it separate,” an insider says. “But they totally wanted to cut corners and marry it to the Journal Sentinel wherever they could.”
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Two years after suing WUWM-FM for race discrimination, former producer Robyn Cherryand the station’s owner, the University of Wisconsin, have settled. While not admitting any wrongdoing, the university agreed to pay Cherry $20,000. The settlement was “with prejudice” – meaning Cherry cannot revive the dispute, which Pressroom reported on in January 2007. Cherry, fired from WUWM in 2006, later got a job with the revamped 88Nine Radio Milwaukee, but left earlier this year. n
