The Cincinnati Post

» see cincypost.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

1881 to 2007 is a longer arc than the online era. the cincinnati post opened as the penny paper on 3 january 1881 out of a second-floor office at vine and longworth. the wellman brothers ran out of money by march. edward willis scripps and his half-brother james took the investment stake, and inside a few years the paper became a founding property of what would grow into scripps-howard newspapers. the name went through evening post before settling on cincinnati post in 1890.

this sits in the part of us media history i can read about but was not around for. the paper peaked with a combined 275,000 circulation across cincinnati and kentucky editions in 1961, decades before the first modem i had access to. its whole reason to exist, the evening-delivery afternoon paper for factory-shift workers coming home to a paper on the porch, was already fading by the time i started reading english-language news online in the early 2000s.

the joint operating agreement with the cincinnati enquirer was signed 22 september 1977 and approved 26 november 1979 by the justice department. the two papers merged business operations while keeping separate editorial staffs, a common late-twentieth-century arrangement meant to save afternoon papers. the JOA was written for thirty years.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the JOA expiry ~

readership fell about 75 percent across the JOA window. the paper that had a combined 275,000 daily in 1961 was down near 25,000 weekdays and 34,000 saturdays by 2007. advertising followed the same slope. scripps announced in 2004 that it would not renew after 2007. gannett, the enquirer's owner, agreed to a three-year subsidy on the post's circulation as part of the wind-down.

the final print edition ran on 31 december 2007. the cover used "-30-" as its headline, the old newsroom mark for end-of-copy. the kentucky post closed the same day. the post's staff was folded out through the last quarter of 2007. cincinnati went from two dailies to one on new year's day 2008.

~ the long tail ~

scripps kept the post archive and licensed selected content back to the enquirer for a period after the closure. the E. W. scripps company survived and grew into a broadcast-heavy media holding company over the following fifteen years, dropping most of its newspaper properties by the mid-2010s. cincinnati sits inside the same one-daily pattern as the many mid-sized us cities that lost afternoon papers between 1978 and 2010.

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