Phil Cauthon, editor of
Lawrence.com, announced Wednesday that
the publication is discontinuing its "Dead Wood" (print) edition of the wildly innovative entertainment Web site:
"For 246 issues, we've covered the arts and culture in Lawrence and generally loved on this community via the printed page -- all with the help of dozens and dozens of writers, photographers, artists, and other contributors.
In the meantime, internet media has come into its own, while printed and delivered newspapers are folding everywhere. It's sad to become the latest casualty of a dying medium, but we're thrilled to be able to continue covering Lawrence arts and culture via our original medium -- lawrence.com, internets edition."
The "Dead Wood" Lawrence.com edition was another vehicle for generating lucrative print ad revenue and was hailed one of the first successful reverse publishing models at a news organization. It was distributed for free to University of Kansas students.
Lawrence.com was one of the early pioneers in hyperlocal and multimedia journalism and it has received several Newspaper Association of America's Digital Edge awards and
Editor & Publisher EPpy awards to prove it.
The site is part of the multi-format media portfolio of The World Company in Lawrence, Kan., which also operates
The Lawrence Journal-World newspaper,
LJWorld.com,
KUSports.com,
49ABCNews.com and Sunflower Broadband, the local Internet provider.
The
World Online sites mentioned above were created by visionaries who changed the path of online journalism, including
Rob Curley,
Adrian Holovaty,
Dan Cox,
Jacob Kaplan-Moss,
Simon Willison and many more. The Django Web framework and Ellington content management system were also products of the World Online nerds in Kansas.
Don't fret though. The end of Lawrence.com's reverse publishing experiment surely won't be the end of its innovative team's work. This is just the natural evolution of the news business.
