I'll be honest, I'm impressed that the Madison paper is still a daily. I figured that with a town of 5,000 or so and the newspaper industry falling on hard times, the Madison Daily Leader would have to cut back in some way. Perhaps they have. I don't know anything about the Daily Leader, so it's not my place to comment too much about it. I noticed they use a lot of AP national stories to fill it in. This does not bother me as much as it might other people. They have to fill copy in some way if they wish to put out a substantial product.
As for their site, I actually prefer it to the Argus Leader's. They offer previews for stories in each section, which is an improvement over the Argus. The one thing I think they could improve on is allowing their page to fill more of the window. I run a full screen window, and right now their site takes up only half of it. They don't necessarily have to fill all of it, but three-fourths would be nice.
I do question the decision to have a free site that complements their paper. I have criticized all papers for doing this, although I do like that The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The New York Times provide me with free baseball news and research material, respectively. In a small town like Madison, I would think every possible subscription would be necessary. Again, as I have mentioned before, I do not anything about the inner workings of the Daily Leader. So perhaps this is a business model that doesn't do any harm.
They do seem to have a model, don't they? Like most papers, they're each trying to find a model that works, so they can do what they need to do. You could stop down to the Leader and look around. Jon Hunter is a good guy who would be interested in hearing from you.
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