'Women’s Wear Daily' Is Turning the Page
“Women’s Wear” was founded by the Fairchild family as a quarterly, Volume 1, Number 1. Within a month, the paper went daily due to demand, for one cent a copy, 50 cents a year.
By Edward Nardoza
Today we say goodbye to an old friend, a morning habit for generations.
This is the final newsprint edition of WWD. We pause to acknowledge this scrappy newspaper and its 105 years of chronicling an equally scrappy industry.
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Decades ago, anxious reporters smoked at their desks, manual typewriters clacked, Linotypes pumped, Teletypes hummed and pneumatic tubes (the latest miracle technology at the time) carried wire reports from floor to floor through the old Fairchild building on East 12th Street. When deadline descended, colossal presses in the basement cranked up and thundered through the floors. Old-timers still talk about how the presses shook the entire building, quite a romantic coda to a day’s work of reporting inside the daily news cycle. At one time, newsboys even delivered an afternoon edition of the paper.
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Today, there’s nothing cyclical about news. It’s Instant Media. A global Niagara of information in a river of technology. Linotypes and Teletypes have given way to silent servers and an alphabet soup of functions and utilities, SEO, URLs, PDFs, CMS, APPs.
We all know how technological leaps have rattled traditional business models across all industries. Facebook has a bigger market capitalization than Coca-Cola. But for anyone in the news business, the two most exhilarating transformations are speed and immediate global reach. We plan to use these tools to the fullest, and we’re not retreating one inch from daily journalism. In fact, we’re now hyper-daily via WWD.com (open 24-7), a digital daily PDF edition (sign up now!) and our social outposts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest.
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Nor are we deserting the print business. We’re launching a weekly edition of WWD on April 29 with deeper context, timely analysis and compelling graphics. And, as our late Inspirer-in-Chief John B. Fairchild would insist, a touch of silly.
Find us everywhere, whenever and wherever you choose. Although a daily printing press no longer shakes our floors when the sun sets, we guarantee our servers will be stressed to the max.
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