A dead newspaper has been resurrected in modern form in St. Louis. The St.Louis Globe Democrat died as a daily newspaper October 29, 1986 at the age of 134, leaving St. Louis as a one-paper town. It has been resurrected and has just finished its first week back—as an online-only newspaper.
Publisher Dan Rositano has 16 fulltime staffers and about 20 contributors. He says he’s amazed at the consumer response in the first week.
Rositano got the idea seven years ago when he was put in charge of a television station’s web page and learned newspaper web pages in markets throughout the country always have the top web pages. He thought then about bringing back the Globe-Demcorat.
He thinks the internet Globe is the future of newspapers. “The future of news is online, is on the internet. And I think you’ll start to see more and more of these types of websites pop up,” he says.
Rositano says today’s young web-oriented news consumers will increasingly rely on the internet as they grow older, eventually leading to the demise of the printed newspaper as we know it.
In the short-term, though, he wants to build trust and create “quality journalism” in the revived Globe-Democrat.
Bob Priddy report 1 min
Interview with Rositano 15 min