I hope you saw my note Monday in the WichiTalk section that effective Monday, Sept. 29, we’ll publish WichiTalk in a broadsheet format, rather than the current tabloid format. You’ll find the WichiTalk stories and features – the same local columnists, puzzles and comics – in a new place in the paper, inside the Local & State section Mondays through Thursdays.
As part of that change, we will no longer be publishing TV listings in the daily paper. We publish those listings on Sundays in our TV guide, and we’ll continue to do so. We’ll also offer a daily TV-highlights package to help steer you to the best of TV offerings.
Another change you’ll see next week is one I’m very excited about – we’ll be extending our popular Business Today coverage to a new section on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Previously, business coverage on those days ran inside Local & State. Now you’ll find Business Today with its own section front page (and in color) on those days. We’ll continue to publish our expanded Business Today section on Thursdays.
Business Today has been a successful venture that helps us offer readers much greater depth and breadth of local business news in a timely way. We’ve been delighted with the enthusiastic response from the business community, and we’re happy to raise the profile of business news even more in The Wichita Eagle and on Kansas.com.
11 Comments
I was greatly dissapointed when you stop listing stock market quotes and now you are stopping the tv listings. When I go to work I take my paper with me to look at throughout the day. I do not have access to the internet at work. I enjoy browsing the stocks and looking at what is on tv tonight, now I won’t have either one. Well I guess I can switch to the USA Today.
Guess I’ll have to find a copy of the Prospector paper around town, I think it still runs TV listings, since the big bad Eagle newsprint monopoly doesn’t think it needs to run TV listings daily now. If I could just find a source for all the comics, I could totally cancel my Eagle during the week.
I knew that it was just a matter of time after that McClatchey bean-counter moved to town that the Eagle would be gutted and made even less relevant. Sometimes the state of local print journalism makes me (figuratively) weep.
podunkboy, you are not alone.
podunkboy,
The Prospector has not published TV listings for nearly two years now.
Give me a break. TV listings? A waste of space anyway. I would rather have more stories than worry about what is on TV.
After reading the article, “Changes to WichiTalk coming your way” in the September 22, 2008 edition of The Wichita Eagle, I thought it was appropriate to make a comment.
Despite living in an “electronic age,” I’ve always enjoyed the peace and relaxation of reading a daily paper at some point during the day. Growing up in Wichita, but living all over the United States and in Central America during the last 24 years; I have had the opportunity to read some wonderful newspapers on a regular basis.
It is amazing to see how bad The Wichita Eagle has become. There is very little content or substance and over the years the paper seems to get further and further “scaled back.” On the recent changes; personally, the consolidation of the WichiTalk section does not bother me. The discontinuation of daily television listings would certainly be an inconvenience to someone traveling. But really, what is next?
When compared to a newspaper from a city of similar size, like The Colorado Springs Gazette; The Wichita Eagle has dramatically less content and certainly less quality. Even in The McClatchy Company portfolio, The Miami Herald is a quality newspaper and even our neighboring Kansas City Star is respectable.
I guess the old saying of “stop the presses” does not apply in Wichita. With today (September 26th) as an example, there was no mention of the largest bank failure (Washington Mutual) in United States history in today’s issue. The story made the 10:00 P.M. local television news last night and other media outlets before that…
Sure, The McClatchy Company needs to cut costs and improve their stock value. They still have to justify and pay for the acquisition of Knight Ridder, but if they continue to destroy the quality of the product; very few readers or advertisers will respond positively.
Wichita had a very strong journalistic heritage. What Marshall M. Murdock created in The Wichita Eagle and continued by quality journalists such as Victor Murdock, Richard M. Long, W. Davis “Buzz” Merritt, or O. Reid Ashe; does not exist today. Even my great-grandfather, Garland P. Ferrell, was the Managing Editor of The Wichita Eagle in the early 1900s after working for several Boston newspapers and The New York Herald. It would be interesting to hear what they would have to say about The Wichita Eagle today.
I doubt significant improvement is coming at The Wichita Eagle. I guess when I am in Wichita, I will have to settle for The Chicago Tribune on-line…
Reading the paper in the morning while I have breakfast is my favorite time of day.I read the news and check TV listings,and can tell with just a glance what I want to watch on TV that evening.The Sunday guide is often lost by midweek,and it takes more time to check anyhow.I think the Eagle is doing their readers a great disservice by taking out the daily TV guide.
I too enjoy the feeling of reading a real newspaper instead of a website, but I’m not sure the Eagle still qualifies as a real newspaper. It is a thin shell of its former self. Its good writers are gone, and now so is its editorial cartoonist, who was an institution.
The editors can spin this all they want, but it is such an inferior product compared to what it was even 5 or 10 years ago. So sad.
My impression is that the Eagle is trying to adjust to a changing environment. The accusation of having become more “interior” is probably true, but local and state news is the one thing that the Eagle has a unique ability to cover. It is very easy now to get national news, and also easy to get editorial commentary on that news, slanted to your particular bias. But Kansas and Wichita-area coverage is not available with a click of the mouse. So I appreciate the local coverage written by people who understand Kansas; outsiders can’t do that and you can’t pick it up off a news feed.
The Eagle seems to be taking many steps to create a sense of community with readers–that is a positive thing. As one who has weathered some corporate take-overs, I admire the consistent quality the paper has maintained through times that must be full of management changes, budget cuts, and staff reductions.
I can appreciate The Eagle’s efforts to reduce costs; but at some point, these efforts become self-defeating. Continued content reductions, in the name of cost reduction, eventually reduces the product value to the consumer. It might be different if we were talking about exact duplications. However, I’ve not found the daily TV listings to be exact duplications of the weekly listings. Specifically, the daily listings are more up-to-date. Case in point, weekly listings have not shown the “N” for new programs but the daily listings have been more likely to include this feature. Tonight’s programs are an example. New programs are not marked as new programs. Perhaps the weekly TV listing guide should be eliminated and the daily listings retained. Of course, the weekend subscribers would be upset then.
I suppose there’s no chance of getting all 14 local stations included now, is there?
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