The Cornell Chronicle Stops Printing

The twenty people who picked up copies of the last issue must be heartbroken.

Good riddance; what a waste of paper this thing was!

The Chronicle, unlike the Ithaca Journal or student-run Daily Sun, was never meant to be objective. It serves as the mouthpiece of the Cornell administration, and runs puff pieces about what's going on around campus.

In its printed form, this thing had no market. No one read it. The Chronicle's delivery staff clearly knew this, since they often just dropped full stacks around campus without actually untying the bundles of newspapers. Two weeks later, they'd pick up the unopened stacks and drop off new ones.

Despite the lack of print readership, the Chronicle was eager to claim success in the online market:

David Brand, Chronicle director, noted the increasingly important role that the well-established Chronicle Online will play in bringing campus news to a growing audience. In the second week of April alone, more than 1.5 million "hits" on stories were recorded on Chronicle Online, with more than 80,000 unique users. Brand said that many of the paper's features likely will continue online.

Let's think, why are there so many hits? Because Chronicle articles are prominently linked on the cornell.edu homepage! If my crappy blog had links from cornell.edu, you could bet that I'd have tens of thousands of visitors each month.

The Chronicle will continue to be a convenient source for University press releases written as news articles, but not much else. It's good to see that they're no longer masquerading as a newspaper.