One View on Detroit Delivery Plan: 'Madness'

By: John K. Hartman Some diesel fumes must have leaked into the executive suite at Detroit Newspapers and driven the bosses mad.
The decision-makers announced Tuesday that the daily newspaper reading habit was as dead at the domestic auto industry.

I call it Motor City Madness.

For the 50 million or so Americans who read a newspaper every day and the half a million or so who read the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News every day, the declaration must have come as a shock. It told the daily newspaper readers in metropolitan Detroit that their services are no longer needed.

This strategy would be more applicable to a small daily newspaper than large metropolitan ones.

Readers were told to migrate to the computer and the mobile device because come spring 2009, your much valued print newspaper will only be delivered to your doorstep three days a week: Thursday, Friday and Sunday. You?ll still pay about the same amount for less than half the service, but who?s keeping score?

Still want to read the daily newspaper? Go to the store of the vending machine and buy a one-section 32-pager on those other four days.

Sound like a plan?

Yes, a plan for obliterating the newspaper industry in a major metropolitan area. R.I.P. Detroit Newspapers right along side R.I.P. GM, Ford and Chrysler.

Here?s what?s wrong with the plan.

First, the newspaper reading is a habit passed down from generation to generation. It is a tradition, a ritual. Morning, breakfast, coffee and newspaper go together for millions of folks like baseball, hotdogs, apple and Chevrolet. Yes, they are folks more likely to be over 50, but they are folks who have considerable spendable income. Once you break a longstanding habit and people replace it with other behavior (TV, internet) to get their news and entertainment, you never get it back. The Detroit Newspapers have announced they are breaking the habit in three months. If they follow through, they will lose tens of thousands of readers who will never come back.

Second, while newspapers have achieved decent numbers of visitors to their web sites, they are not attracting a decent amount of advertising revenue and they show no signs of getting significant advertising from the web anytime soon. The Detroit Newspapers are dreaming if they think the abandoned readers of their print product are going to gravitate to THEIR web sites. There are a billion unique web addresses. There are many focusing on the Detroit area that will meet the needs of the former Free Press and News readers. The bottom line is that while the print newspaper is special and unique, the newspaper web sites are just another face in a very big crowd. Loyalty does not appear to transfer from print to web, sorry to say.

Third, the beauty of the print newspaper is that people depend on having it every morning. Once that cycle is broken, people will get out of the habit of looking for the paper every morning. After getting up Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday to no paper, how many people are going to get up the next day and say, ?Great day. It?s Thursday and we get a paper today?? Not many.

Fourth, the great strength of print newspapers today is not the news content but the ability to deliver advertising both within the newspaper and through inserts to an attractive audience. Yes, people who read and have disposable income are an attractive audience. Even a moron knows that the web is a better way to deliver news with its ability to update instantly, give unlimited amounts of information, and offer blogs, links, audio, video, animation and 2-way communication. The daily newspaper can deliver ads seven days a week.

In conclusion, I am hoping that this is just a negotiating ploy by Detroit Newspapers to extract all manner of concessions from its heavily unionized staff and to get a waiver from the federal government to escape the Joint Operating Agreement. I am hoping that the final outcome will be one newspaper, the Free Press, publishing 7 days a week, owned by Gannett. The News and its owner Dean Singleton will be paid off and go quietly into that diesel-tinged good night.

Copyright, 2008. John K. Hartman. All Rights Reserved.)