A Small Town Square No More

The wrecking ball is taking this handsome old red brick building down, beginning today. The photos were taken just last night — its last as a complete structure. Once the long time home of Waal’s department store, an old fashioned store in the Marshall Fields tradition, and until recently the site of the beloved Antique Mall in Walworth, Wisconsin, it shall soon be but a memory, along with the end of the town square, thanks to plans to straighten out the highway for passing trucks (the corner of the town square with, a beautiful statue, also to be moved, can be seen in the foreground) This little community, long on small town tradition, will soon be “longing” to find ways bring some of it back.

“Like to remind folks that a newspaper is actually the first mobile app”

From today’s Milwaukee Business Journal:

Fans of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s print edition can take heart: The CEO of the newspaper’s owner predicts continued publication of a hard copy “for a long, long time.”
Milwaukee is the media market where Journal Media Group (NYSE: JMG) has the greatest daily newspaper penetration with consumers, so the print edition will remain safe for the foreseeable future, said the company’s CEO Tim Stautberg.
“I suspect in a market like Milwaukee, it’s a long, long time (for continued printing),” Stautberg said at a joint luncheon Tuesday of the Milwaukee Press Club and the Rotary Club of Milwaukee at the Milwaukee County War Memorial.
Stautberg has been CEO of the new publicly traded company since April 1 after the closing of a transaction involving Milwaukee-based Journal Communications Inc. and Cincinnati-based E.W. Scripps Co. Prior to taking the helm at Journal Media Group, Stautberg was the top newspaper executive at Scripps.
Journal Media Group consists of the Journal Sentinel, 13 former Scripps daily newspapers and a number of community newspapers.
The print edition of daily newspapers remains the preferred way of attaining news for many consumers, Stautberg said. He said 45 percent to 50 percent of adults still read newspapers.
“To me there is still a habit that is very important to a lot of folks in the communities where we operate off reading a physical product,” he said. “I like to remind folks that a newspaper is actually the first mobile app.”

An Old Salt Missing the SeaBell…

CE and the SeaBell, 7-09