Will They Still Call it 'The City Paper'?

By: E&P Staff The City Paper of Nashville, Tenn., plans to cut back distribution of its print edition and rely primarily on its electronic version in an effort to address reader habits, production costs and resource use. The free weekday paper will use Olive Software's ActivePaper Daily to make the shift to paperless.

Launched seven years ago in the wake of the demise of Nashville's Banner, the City Paper reports daily readership of 136,000. Its content is almost exclusively local, and is distributed in office buildings throughout the city. This meant most were reading the paper at their desks and turning increasingly to the online version, explained publisher Albie Del Favero in a statement.

This fact, combined with the prospect of saving printing and distribution costs, and reducing paper and fuel use, pushed the paper to consider focusing on a digital product. "The City Paper typically uses over 1.5 million pounds of newsprint per year. By moving just 25% of our readership to the electronic edition, we'd save almost 400,000 pounds of paper and reduce our carbon footprint dramatically," Del Favero said.

The paper uses Olive's ActivePaper Daily to produce an electronic version of the paper in its original format as well as its HTML site. Readers can access the paper using a Web browser, and the underlying XML-based format allows them to search the full text of articles, ads, and image captions.

The software also let publishers repurpose content in new applications, such as digital archives and mobile subscriptions, to increase revenues using existing content. And with ActivePaper's RSS capabilities, The City Paper can push news from its electronic edition to the paper's HTML site, which the paper uses for blogs, breaking news, special features, and event listings.