{"id":199,"date":"2008-10-02T13:58:11","date_gmt":"2008-10-02T17:58:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/?p=199"},"modified":"2008-10-02T13:58:11","modified_gmt":"2008-10-02T17:58:11","slug":"what-does-it-all-mean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/what-does-it-all-mean\/","title":{"rendered":"What does it all mean?"},"content":{"rendered":"

All y’all who’ve been asking that question \u00a0in re: the Creative Loafing bankruptcy filing should read this great, thorough, and at times chilling article<\/a> on the past, present, and future of the CL business plan, by a former CL staffer now at Atlanta Magazine. (h\/t Whet<\/a>)<\/p>\n

The nuts and bolts of it:<\/p>\n

“In July of 2007, after I\u2019d been gone from\u00a0Creative Loafing<\/em>\u00a0for almost two years, Eason announced he was buying the Chicago\u00a0Reader<\/em>\u00a0and the Washington\u00a0City Paper<\/em>, 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\u2019t think so. Instead, he saw the acquisitions as giving Creative Loafing Inc. a \u201cpivotal gateway of connectivity with the young adult audience,\u201d according to a press release at the time.<\/p>\n

“If you\u2019re 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\u2014Atalaya and BIA Digital Partners\u2014that had provided the cash necessary for the purchase.”<\/p>\n

And, in terms of what a rejiggered, webcentric Reader publishing model might look like:<\/p>\n

“In Eason\u2019s mind, writers would post all week, while \u201csomebody in a back room,\u201d 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\u00a0CL<\/em>\u00a0staffer agreed. ‘Things are written differently for print than they are for the web. It\u2019s not a matter of cut and paste. It isn\u2019t just that we\u2019ve blogged for five days and then on deadline day we can cut and paste things in. It doesn\u2019t work that way.’<\/p>\n

“Eason, though, appears to want it to work that way. Already, his editor at the WashingtonCity Paper\u00a0<\/em>has\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0there will be no more regular cover stories in the paper. For alt weeklies, which made their reputations on long-form narratives, it\u2019s a radical change. And not, in my estimation anyway, a sensible one.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

All y’all who’ve been asking that question \u00a0in 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 … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[36,29,35],"class_list":["post-199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-bankruptcy","tag-chicago-reader","tag-creative-loafing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}