All y’all who’ve been asking that question  in re: the Creative Loafing bankruptcy filing should read this great, thorough, and at times chilling article on the past, present, and future of the CL business plan, by a former CL staffer now at Atlanta Magazine. (h/t Whet)

The nuts and bolts of it:

“In July of 2007, after I’d been gone from Creative Loafing for almost two years, Eason announced he was buying the Chicago Reader and the Washington City Paper, two of the most reputable alt weeklies in the country. To finance the deal, he borrowed $40 million from investors, putting up his controlling stock in the company as collateral. If it seemed a reckless move in a time when newsprint costs are skyrocketing and readers are abandoning traditional newspapers in droves, Eason evidently didn’t think so. Instead, he saw the acquisitions as giving Creative Loafing Inc. a “pivotal gateway of connectivity with the young adult audience,” according to a press release at the time.

“If you’re not sure what that means, join the club. I talked to Ben Eason late Tuesday, a day after his company had declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company had been unable to make its loan payments to the two investors—Atalaya and BIA Digital Partners—that had provided the cash necessary for the purchase.”

And, in terms of what a rejiggered, webcentric Reader publishing model might look like:

“In Eason’s mind, writers would post all week, while “somebody in a back room,” as he put it, would be thinking about what from the website would go into the print edition. By this definition, the print product would become nothing more than a distillation of highlights from the website, a rather stale news digest. At least that was my impression in hearing Eason talk. A current CL staffer agreed. ‘Things are written differently for print than they are for the web. It’s not a matter of cut and paste. It isn’t just that we’ve blogged for five days and then on deadline day we can cut and paste things in. It doesn’t work that way.’

“Eason, though, appears to want it to work that way. Already, his editor at the WashingtonCity Paper has said there will be no more regular cover stories in the paper. For alt weeklies, which made their reputations on long-form narratives, it’s a radical change. And not, in my estimation anyway, a sensible one.”