Sadness! Enterprise moving out of Oconomowoc; its now or never for the game to change
We’re not posting this out of a sick sense of glee; we’re genuinely sad that the Oconomowoc Enterprise is moving out of Oconomowoc. The message was on the front page of the May 28th Oconomowoc Enterprise. We’d offer you a link or a scan, but, you know, they don’t have a link or a scan online. More on that in a second.
Citing “the economy” and “the competitiveness of the printing industry”, the Enterprise announced that on June 15, they’re leaving our fair city.
One of those changes includes moving the staff of the Oconomowoc Enterprise from … Oconomowoc to the Freeman building … (in) Waukesha. (Volume 121, No. 44)
We’ll curtail discussions about “an industries failure to adapt to a changing marketplace out of a desperate attempt by the managers and middle managers to ride out the old model until they retire” out of respect for the good people whose lives have been disrupted by this foolish decision of the Freeman’s Executive Committee. We have first hand experience with trying to be the Newspaper of Record for a community from afar. It’s hard. We’re not sure it can be done. And we know it can’t be done with the half-hearted attempts at interactivity that the Enterprise has employed on the Internet.
Since our days as the captain at the helm of the Enterprise’s cross-town rival, we’ve learned to appreciate that which made the Enterprise special. Many of those things are uneffected by the Enterprise’s move out of town. But without a local interface with the people of Oconomowoc, the Enterprise is going to need to try harder to be accessible. The World Wide Web is exactly the –right- tool for that. I only hope that the folks at the Conley Publishing Group (the Enterprise’s publisher) figure that out before its too late.
