Downshift in Motor City

By: Jennifer Saba Detroit has long been a hotspot for the newspaper industry. The joint operating agreement between the Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News was the hardest to gain government approval, and went all the way to the Supreme Court. One of the longest strikes in newspaper history occurred in the city ? a difficult 14-month standoff that caused a 35% plunge in daily circulation. In 2005, months before Knight Ridder was forced onto the auction block, it freed itself from the Free Press and its hard-fought JOA by swapping several papers with its partner, Gannett.

In December, the Free Press and the News made more waves by dropping four days of home delivery, the most sought-after type of circulation by advertisers ? the kind of circulation that every publisher is desperate to get. The Detroit Media Partnership will now deliver papers at homes only on Thursday, Friday and Sunday. In doing so, the Free Press is foregoing an average of 195,700 home-delivered editions for the eliminated days, while the News is missing out on about 94,800 copies, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

The hope is that readers will tap into the Web sites of the two papers, subscribe to electronic editions, or go to their local Quicki-Mart and buy newsstand copies. While the move will save costs, it comes with hazards ? principally, that it breaks the newspaper "habit" for readers, especially for the most loyal over-50 set.

Detroit Media Partnership CEO David Hunke assured those that the partnership never considered shutting down one of the papers, although there are skeptics who claim otherwise.

But one positive takeaway most hailed: No immediate cuts in the newsrooms. "Ink on paper is less important than the boots on the street," Heath Meriwether, who served as editor and publisher of the Free Press between 1987 and 2003, tells E&P. "It is not the form that matters, as much as the substance."

Jon Wolman, editor and publisher of the Detroit News, agreed: "It is an alternative to the cycle of buyouts and downsizing. It stabilizes the newsroom. It is an important commitment to content." But will it last? While the newsroom was spared the axe, the partnership will lose about 190 positions on the business side.

Along with the frequency scramble, the company highlighted some other changes in the works and some that have already launched, including a new locally focused fashion magazine, a site called MomsLikeMe.com, and a "vigorous planning process that will result in new digital offerings."

The Free Press hired design and innovation firm IDEO to conduct ethnographic studies on how people in Detroit consume media. One finding that stood out was that people went to many places to consume news and were "tremendously open to information from different sources," Ilya Prokopoff, a partner at IDEO, explained.

So will readers cut the papers more slack by making that trek to the store, and/or letting their fingers do the walking to access the papers' Web sites? Or, vexed by their home delivery cutoff, will they be turned off entirely? The outcome of the IDEO studies and the partnership's planning process will have to wait until sometime in Q1 this year for the answer.