There’s been plenty of pain along the way: layoffs, buyouts, wage freezes, and advertising declines. The daily newspaper is actually…kind of…almost… thriving. But in the past decade, they’ve suffered the steepest declines, the biggest cutbacks, the worst losses.īut something’s different in Milwaukee.

Before the web, metros occupied the business’ sweet spot: big newsrooms, a captive audience, and riches flowing in from the classifieds. In other cities, this might feel like a tidy metaphor for the plight of the newspaper industry - particularly the metro dailies. He instead suggests The Onion, print copies of which are just outside in a rusting metal box. Ask for a copy of the local daily and you get an apologetic chuckle from the clerk. MILWAUKEE - You won’t find any newspapers for sale at the fluorescent-lit convenience store about two blocks from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s downtown headquarters. We thought it would be a good time to look in on Lucius Nieman’s old daily - now known, after a consolidation of morning and afternoon papers, as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. This weekend, the foundation is celebrating its 75th anniversary. In her will, Agnes Wahl Nieman left a large part of her estate - which had been built by the Journal’s success - to Harvard to “promote and elevate the standards of journalism and educate persons deemed especially qualified for journalism.” That gift led to the Nieman Fellowships and the Nieman Foundation, of which Nieman Lab is a part. He died in 1935 the next year, so did his wife.

Editor’s note: In 1882, not long before his 25th birthday, a Wisconsin newspaperman named Lucius Nieman gave his new paper, The Milwaukee Journal, a mission: “The Journal will be the outspoken, independent organ of the people against all that is wrong or unworthy of support in public men and the legislation of the State and nation.” Over the following half-century, he built the Journal into a nationally noted, Pulitzer-winning powerhouse.

Katie cummings joi