The news broke this morning that The Onion—and thus, The A.V. Club—is ceasing print publication in its three remaining cities (Chicago, Milwaukee, Providence, R.I.) on December 12. For the vast majority of you, this means nothing: Even if you lived in a city with one of our print editions, what actually made it in the paper was about 1/50th of what we do at avclub.com.
It does, however, mean that we’re losing our awesome local editorial in Milwaukee—the last remaining city to have local A.V. Club content—led by the great Matt Wild. Matt has contributed occasionally to the national site since he came aboard in 2011, and he will continue to do so after things wrap up in Milwaukee next month. While we’re tremendously sad to lose Matt as a full-time staffer—and all the great folks in our Milwaukee office, including sales manager and our longtime pal Erin Frank—we’re glad that he’ll still be writing for us.
If you’re interested in the details of why we’re closing the print editions—and have somehow missed the story of newspapers struggling around the world—check out Matt’s post or this Crain’s story. Otherwise, there isn’t much to say about it: We’ll continue along here at avclub.com as usual, only without the Wednesday-night rush to get all the print stuff ready for production.
While it is the end of an era, it was an inevitable one. And local businesses can breathe a sigh of relief that they won’t have to worry about front-page headlines like this one offending their customers. Well, actually, that makes us sad, but we’ll carry on.
Thanks, as always, to our readers in those cities, and the readers who make The A.V. Club such a success. Next up: A complete redesign is coming in a couple weeks. We can’t wait to launch it, so stay tuned.