Who needs newspapers?

Paul Steinle and his wife Dr. Sara Brown set off on a journey to visit newspapers throughout the country to answer the question: Who needs newspapers? They have visited newspapers in nearly 40 states and have chronicled their findings on the website WhoNeedsNewspapers.org. Read their stories starting with Illinois' Northwest Herald in Crystal Lake -- http://whoneedsnewspapers.org/np_main.php?npId=ilnwh

News on the radio can thrive

Mark Twain said it about his own death: "The report is greatly exaggerated."

Those who say "radio is dead" are equally full of hype, according to a new article in The Communicator from the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA).

Plus, the examples of success are in Illinois, at Bloomington's WJBC-AM and -FM (pictured above), and at Champaign's WDWS-AM and WHMS/WUIL-FM.

There, the stations successfully attract sizable audiences with not only news, but solid and enterprising journalism and community-minded, public-service reporting.

Kevin Finch's feature, "Radio news on more than just a shoestring," is a well-written account of real-life radio work that contradicts the "conventional wisdom' that's a lot more conventional than wise.

Print pay walls increasing, responses to NYT vary

GateHouse Media's Peoria Journal Star and State Journal Register in Springfield have erected "paywalls" limiting free access to online contents, following several newspaper experiments -- most recently the New York Times.

A week ago, marketing experts from Washington University in St. Louis offered different reactions to the Times' attempt, with one forecasting a decline in audience and another pronouncing it a good business model.

Read the whole summary here --http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/22076.aspx