Last week the staff and friends of Creative Loafing got self indulgent and partied for a few days, celebrating 25 years of publishing in the Tampa Bay area (under our current name as well as The Weekly Planet moniker). As I wrote about in the special anniversary issue, alt-weeklies (as well as many mainstream newspaper organizations) are currently operating under very challenging economic conditions, as much of the action has spread to the Internet, without attendant advertising following suit.
Some publications have made a go of it by going strictly digital — but that's still a dicey proposition in the current media landscape, unless you've got tremendous traffic flowing to your site.
This is all written as a prelude to the fact that the Florida political website Florida Voices, which was introduced with great fanfare a year and a half ago, has apparently bitten the dust and will be no more once the session ends in Tallahassee this coming Friday.
Florida Voices editor Rosemary Goudreau first put out the word last Friday, and she followed up with a short missive on the home page on Monday. She attributed the lack of sufficient advertising dollars as the culprit for its demise.
This article appears in Apr 25 – May 1, 2013.
