NiemanJournalismLab reporting: It wasn’t that long ago that Maine’s Village Soup
was being lauded as a model for what a print/online hybrid strategy for
local journalism could look like. That optimism took a big hit late
Friday with the abrupt closure of Village NetMedia’s newspapers and their related websites.
Fifty-six Village Soup staffers got word on Friday evening, via
email, that the Bar Harbor Times, Capital Weekly, Village Soup Gazette,
Village Soup Journal and the Scene would immediately cease operations.
The papers’ websites had been taken down and replaced with a message
from Village Soup owner Richard M. Anderson about how “profound changes
in the newspaper publishing business, a weak economy and our investment
in new products created severe financial challenges” that made survival
impossible. Employees were told that a deal that could have saved the
papers — some of which were launched in the 1820s — had unraveled.
“[Anderson] got the word at the close of banking hours on Friday that
this negotiation was not going to proceed, and I imagine he probably
spent the next couple of hours trying to figure out how to tell us,”
Shlomit Auciello, a former reporter and photographer for Village Soup
Gazette, told me. “We are a little bit of a petri dish here right now.”
Anderson didn’t respond to my attempts at an interview. (His blog, Sustainable Journalism,
was last updated in September.) But yesterday the Bangor Daily News
found Anderson and quoted him saying he felt awful about the closure,
adding, “Nobody did anything wrong.”
http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/03/village-soups-hot-pursuit-of-a-hyperlocal-model-goes-cold/?utm_source=Daily+Lab+email+list&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=16b25e94cd-DAILY_EMAIL
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