Former 'Freep' Publisher Meriwether: Delivery Cuts Good and Bad

By: Joe Strupp Former Detroit Free Press Publisher Heath J. Meriwether, who also spent eight years as the paper's top editor, said plans to cut back home delivery of his former employer is a better move than cutting newsroom staff.

But he also raised concerns about how the reduced home delivery approach might affect advertising. "The home delivery audience was the big prize," said Meriwether, who served as publisher from 1996 to 2003 and prior to that as editor from 1987 to 1995. "They were the committed audience, they had the money to spend and they were more involved in the community."

The current editors of both papers, meanwhile, stressed to E&P the importance of the latest change not affecting their staff levels.

Meriwether focused on the positive elements of today's announcement that the Free Press and JOA partner Detroit News will stop home delivery on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. He said it is better to keep the newsgathering intact.

"My reaction is that the ink-on-paper is less important than the boots on the street," said Meriwether, now a writing coach and instructor in New York. "You have to have a commitment to reporting the news and I think the Free Press has done that in the past few years. It is not the form that matters as much as the substance."

Meriwether also praised the current Detroit newspaper leadership for seeking to cut other areas of the operation before newsroom staffing, especially at a time when Web is becoming a greater force in news reporting.

"Even as the forms of distribution change, it is really important to continue to remember what we are here for -- to do the reporting that is necessary to make our community better," he said. "My first concern was 'how much more are they going to cut the newsroom?' I find it encouraging that they are not because we have a mission to report the news."

Free Press Editor Paul Anger told E&P that the focus on keeping the newsroom staff the same is indeed what is important.

"We can either cut so deep that we ruin our ability to do good reporting, or we can cut some of our legacy costs, costs of delivering the paper," he said. "The key has to be the content. We have cut our news staff, we have had our own reductions in the past few years. But we have still got a news staff that is doing good work and we have to make that the key."

Anger also pointed to the expanded Web approach, that he says already means online broadcasting of events such as Election Night. "We are doing more multi-media, more chats, evermore updates and more blogging by staff," he said. "We are cutting back on one area in order to expand in another."

Jon Wolman, editor and publisher of The Detroit News, agreed: "It is a very important concept. It is an alternative to the cycle of buyouts and downsizing. It stabilizes the newsroom. It is an important commitment to content."

But he says his news staff will have to utilize the Web in new ways and rely less on print. "We want to design newspapers for these circumstances," he said about the loss of some home delivery. "There is a lot of imagination that is going into the way we present our news coverage."

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