The Biz Blog

You probably read one of the obituaries for The Cincinnati Post, which folded at the end of 2007 with the expiration of a Joint Operating Agreement. If your mind was elsewhere Jan. 1, as mine was, you may have missed that E.W. Scripps decided something could be salvaged from the wreckage -- an online-only version of the sister Kentucky Post.

 

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KyPost.com, subtitled "Life in the (859)" in honor of the local area code, may be more a product of special circumstances than an augur of deaths and rebirths to come, but it joins a growing list of experiments to watch.

 

Why would such a site make sense?

 

Cincinnati is a riverfront town with substantial suburbs across the Ohio River in Northern Kentucky (also home to the Cincinnati airport). Gannett's surviving Enquirer does have a Kentucky-specific Web site, but through the years Kentucky was more The Post's turf. "The Post has a tradition as a voice for the area," Kerry Duke, the site's managing editor, said in a phone interview. "So the brand is good."

 

The site can draw on news and production resources at WCPO-TV, a Scripps station in Cincinnati. Duke actually works there rather than in the 859. 

 

The region's best-known town, Newport, has a colorful sin-city past -- once home to lots of liquor, girlie joints and gambling. "They are trying to shed the image" with a gentrified shopping and river park district, Duke said, "and they have been pretty successful."

 

As one blog commentator put it, "to call the staff 'skeletal' would be an insult to ...the undergirdings of the human body." For starters, it is just Duke (formerly projects editor for the Kentucky Post), a reporter and material from the TV station's Kentucky reporter. Over time the site will be looking for contributions from citizens and perhaps freelancers. "Part of our content is announcements -- we're interested in small news too," Duke said. "For instance, we have an obituary page, which is something you don't see too often on the Web."  

 

At a glance, KyPost's home page is bare-bones, too -- the Web equivalent of a newly-opened wine store whose shelves are not yet fully stocked. There are few ads, no display video and a link to slide shows with nothing yet in it.

 

But some of the simplicity is intentional, Duke said. Scripps' online products director, Jay Small, is an advocate and practitioner of the less-is-more school of home page design, even at a fully grown-up Web sites like knoxnews in Knoxville, Tenn. In the spirit of his model, there has been a wave of "decluttering" redesigns of newspaper sites over the last year.

 

So the site delivers on its announced promise of "easy to use." And Tuesday morning it had a quick summary and link to a big breaking event -- Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear's state-of-the-state address, announcing that the commonwealth was essentially broke and austere budget measures inevitable.

 

MinnPost.com (read my previous story here), a nonprofit launched last fall in the Minneapolis-St.Paul region with foundation and donor funding, represents a high-end attempt to pick up some of the serious reporting and commentary that emaciated dailies are dropping. KyPost is more down-to-earth, and Scripps is a bottom-line outfit that wouldn't try such an experiment unless it believed there was a potential profit payoff.

The ad hoc appearance and soft opening are not totally misleading, however. The intent to close the print Post was announced years ago. Scripps looked at Web alternatives but only gave the project a green light late last year and brought Duke aboard after Thanksgiving. 

 

It is way too early to suggest this as a potential model should industry distress intensify and a number of print papers be forced to close. But stranger things could happen than dicing the remnants into low-cost, local-focused Web-only news operations.