Archive for July 2010

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An Underdog’s Chance

July 26, 2010

As I write this post, it sure looks bad for the Democrats in November. But with three months to go before the election, it would be foolish to dismiss Tom Barrett’s chance to be elected governor.

Hey, who knows what will happen?

In this story for Isthmus, I decided not to write a a conventional candidate profile,  but to lay out the scenario is which Barrett might win.

Here’s how it begins:

The email from the Republican partisan might as well have had a sound file attached of him laughing and chortling.

He was among a number of activists — Democrats and Republicans alike — whom I asked how Democratic gubernatorial nominee Tom Barrett might pull off a win in what looks to be a deliciously good GOP year.

“It is truly stunning,” the Republican partisan wrote back. “It took the GOP eight years [of President George W. Bush], split partisan control, scandals and a war to ruin their brand. The Democrats have ruined their brand in a mere 18 months.”

Cue the chortling. “In that time, Democrats have alienated and energized the middle and the right by overreaching…while alienating their own base on the left by underdelivering on any actual policy.

“It is the worst of all worlds,” he announced with the subtlety of an executioner swinging an ax. Democrats are demoralized, while “the right and the tea party middle…will crawl across broken glass on top of fiery coals to get to the polls.”

This would be a truly vertiginous turn of events. It seems like only yesterday that Wisconsin Democrats were on top of the world….

To read more, go here.

Categories: Politics, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus

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The Cap Times Web Experiment

July 23, 2010

For whatever reason, a story I wrote two years ago on The Capital Times’ move to a mostly Web existence surfaced the other day at the Association of Alternative Newspapers’ archive. (Or so I learned from a Google alert.)

Given my interest in the media, I might as well post it. Here’s how the story begins:

Good luck, Cap Times. You’ll need it. Converting from a six-day-a-week paid paper to an online news site is like jumping from a very high cliff into a very deep and mysterious pool.

The paper might be killed. Or it might be transformed.

One thing’s for sure: The Capital Times that Madison has known for 90 years will be gone. Online publishing is a fundamentally different proposition for both journalists and readers. Experts consider it a classic disruptive technology that reorders daily life for just about everyone it touches and destroys what was thought to be a durable economic model for the eclipsed technology.

Newspapers won’t die off as quickly as slide rules did when calculators were introduced, but the changes under way are so epochal you’d be foolish to believe anyone who speaks confidently of what publishing will be like in 10 years.

“Nobody knows anything,” as veteran screenwriter William Goldman famously said of the secrets to successful movie-making. The newspaper business is even more in the dark as to how it will make its next buck.

Actually, newspapers are beginning to make out a possible future–paywalls and online subscriptions. It may be time for me to check back with the Cap Times and see how its experiment fares.

For more of the original story,  go here.

Categories: Media, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus

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