GOT EMPTY RACKS? START AN EVENING EDITION Vail Daily gives Colorado resort a business-oriented reason to read in the late afternoon.

Seizing an opportunity to generate "urban-like revenues in a small town," the publishers of the morning Vail (Colo.) Daily launched an evening paper on Tax Day in April.

Spying empty racks in the afternoon, Eagle Summit Publishing Co. realized "there was an opportunity to gain some readership on what we call the second shift," says Cliff Thompson, general manager of the Monday-Friday Vail Valley Today. The target audience: bartenders, waitresses, "people going out to dinner."

The resort community of about 35,000 swells during ski season, with two million "skier days" a year bringing an influx of well-heeled tourists as well as people attending conferences. So the new paper -- "more of a niche publication" -- focuses on business.

"We started out with just me and AP," he says, with the Associated Press providing a table of about 100 local-interest stocks after the market closes. With digitized production, the press can start about 2:40 p.m. local time, with papers trucked 30 miles "over the pass" from the printer in Summit County in time to be distributed to more than 400 racks by 4:30 p.m.

The free, 4250-circulation paper runs about 12 pages a day, about one-fourth the page count of the morning paper. New revenue veins are being mined in the "advertising-crazy area" for the evening paper, Thompson says, with a focus on business-to-business messages for firms selling office supplies and the like, as well as consumer-oriented ads for banks, health care providers, attorneys, insurance -- and jobs.

"There are many, many, many jobs but not that many employees," Thompson says. "That's the hard part up here." The paper itself has two reporter openings; the new hires will help increase local coverage from the current one-third of the paper's content. "We're aiming less at occurrence news and more at enterprise, issue-oriented journalism. That's hard to do in a daily."

Underwritten by Eagle Summit's owners, Swift Newspapers of Reno, Nev., Vail Valley Today is "a grand experiment," Thompson says. "It's a hoot," says the former publisher of a weekly, "because as a weekly guy I used to have to wait for stories. Not any more."

-- P.W.