Afternoon newspapers... why not?

A couple of weeks ago, I had a conversation with Pat Frantz, the publisher of The Herald-Dispatch, in which we kicked around the question of why more daily newspapers don't publish in the afternoon rather than in the morning.

The easy answer is that readers want their newspaper delivered in the morning. My own reading habits go against that. I may be biased because most of what goes in the newspaper I know about the day before. At home, though, I normally don't read the paper of the morning in the summer. I do the rest of the year, because I get it out of the tube when I walk with my youngest to his bus stop. Even then, I save part of the paper to read when I get home in the evening. I rush through it in the morning and savor it at night.

Having said that, The Cincinnati Post made this announcement today:

The Cincinnati Post and The Kentucky Post -- afternoon daily newspapers serving Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky for more than a century -- will cease publication on Dec. 31, 2007, the newspaper's owners announced today.

The last edition of the newspapers, owned by Cincinnati-based E.W. Scripps Co., will be published on that Monday, New Year's Eve.

The decision by Scripps to cease publication comes three years after the company was notified by the Gannett Co., owner of the Cincinnati Enquirer, that the 30-year contractual agreement under which the Enquirer handles business operations for The Post would not be renewed when it expired at the end of this year. Under that agreement, advertising and subscription sales, production and distribution were handled for The Post newspapers by the Enquirer, but the news operations and the editorial pages were separate and competed with each other.

Despite my own reading habits, afternoon newspapers are fading. Not many of them shut down nowadays because so few are left, especially in larger cities.

I hate to see newspapers die. I would even if I didn't work for one. I grew up reading them, and on the rare occasions I travel far from home, I like to buy the local paper and look through it. Back in 1990, while taking a leisurely drive through southern Ontario, I had to buy a weekly whose lead story was something like 5,000 chickens at area farm killed in heat wave.

You don't get that on the radio. And when you see it on the Internet, it's more than likely been picked up from a local paper.

And that's it. No kicker ending with a witty, incisive comment.