What's it like with one print and one electronic daily in the same city?

Just about a year ago, the Capital Times, one of two daily newspapers in Madison, Wisconsin’s state capital, killed off its print edition and became one of the first urban dailies in the U.S. to turn itself into a Web-based e-paper. The decision, says Cap Times Publisher Clayton Frink, was a no-brainer.

"We did it because our audience was shrinking," says Frink, who adds that he had been exploring the idea for five years with the paper’s local co-owners, Capital Newspapers and Davenport, Iowa-based Lee Enterprises. Circulation at the Cap Times, one of the nation’s last afternoon dailies, had dropped to just 17,000 and its larger publishing partner, the Wisconsin State Journal, had a solid grip on the morning market.

“Pretty soon," the Cap Times former editor, Dave Zweifel, told the Associated Press before the shift, "we’re going to be talking to ourselves."

Some day very soon, if Hearst carries through on its proposed plans, Seattle may wake up to find itself the second sizeable city in the nation with a local print daily that has gone all-electronic. While there are some major differences between Madison and Seattle — the former has a population of 283,000, including a state university with a student population of 42,000, about 1-½ times the UW student population, while the Seattle area has well over a million readers — the Cap Times yearlong e-paper experiment offers some interesting hints at what may be coming here.

As an e-paper the Cap Times has become a lab bench for the troubled newspaper industry as it explores the murky option of switching from print to an e-paper. Frink calls the Cap Times’ transition a work in progress, comparing it to "changing the tires on the car while it is still moving down the road."

Neither the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which is scheduled to close next month, nor its owner, Hearst Corp., which says it is studying replacing the print paper with an e-paper, would discuss their plans with Crosscut. Frink and other Cap Times executives say they haven’t been contacted by Hearst or P-I officials about their experience in Madison.

But others have been in touch. Frink says he gets a couple of calls a month from other papers, asking how things are working out. His answer, which he admits probably isn’t very satisfying: "I tell them every newspaper is different and that what we’re doing here is not particularly applicable to every other situation in the country."

One thing that makes the Madison papers different is that they are both co-owned by Lee and Capital Newspapers. They have operated under a joint publishing agreement since 1948, predating passage of the 1970s federal antitrust legislation that allowed joint operating agreements like the one that currently binds the P-I and the Seattle Times.

Under the Madison arrangement, the Cap Times and State Journal share profits and expenses 50-50. (By contrast, the Seattle Times and P-I split their profits 60-40, after the Times is paid to handle all non-news operations like printing, distribution and marketing for both papers.) The news staffs in Madison share a newsroom and support services, but publish separately and compete on some stories. As a joint operation, they make money, says Frink, and readership is growing at both at both publications.

Currently, the Cap Times distributes its news stories through its own site; Madison.com, that it shares with the State Journal; and a sports website. In addition, it publishes two free weekly print tabloids, one specializing in arts and the other in politics, that are included with the morning print paper.

Frink says that after the digital switch, the State Journal’s circulation jumped from 89,000 to 100,000 — about the same as the P-I’scurrent circulation—and the number of unique visitors to the Cap Times website — the industry’s benchmark measure — has also been climbing steadily. Ultimately, the morning paper captured about 65 percent of the Cap Times print circulation, but because Wisconsin has a "negative option rule" every subscription transfer had to be individually approved by the subscriber, a tedious process. Most eventually made the move, though about 3,000 Cap Times readers who subscribed to both papers disappeared, along with another 1,800 single-issue readers who bought the evening paper from street boxes and news stands.

How that switch would play out in Seattle if the P-I became an e-paper isn’t clear. Currently, though the P-I and Times compete head-to-head in the morning and the reader overlap between the two papers is small. The P-I’s circulation focuses on street sales within Seattle, while the Timesaims at subscription sales to the suburbs.

When it went all-digital, the Cap Times cut its news staff to 40 from 60. (Of the P-I’s staff of 181, about 120 work in the paper’s newsroom.) The e-paper’s current editor, Paul Fanlund, says at first he had his reporters and editors replicate the print paper’s traditional news coverage, posting stories about weather, fires and car accidents, using the classic 12-inch inverted-pyramid news style.