Editor’s Note
Back in the old days — that’s less than a decade and before there were such things as blogs and interactive conversations with readers — editors used to respond to their newspaper readers with an “editor’s note.” Sometimes it clarified a point made in a letter to the editor. Sometimes it offered a correction. Sometimes it was just a simple explanation. An editor’s note was a handful of sentences; maybe a four or five paragraphs. It was always a personal link between the editor and the reader. Only difference between it and today’s blog is the immediacy and the platform. Welcome to Editor’s Note.

Detroit newspapers go 3X

December 16th, 2008 at 03:59pm Linda Grist Cunningham

Follow these numbers: There are two newspapers in Detroit. Their two owners share one Joint Operating Agreement. Between the two, they published 13 editions a week and shared a Sunday newspaper. They support two news Web sites: freep.com and detnews.com

Beginning in early 2009, the two newspapers will radically remix the products in their portfolio by upping the stake in online and lowering their holdings in newsprint. And, if you haven’t already heard this: They will deliver a newspaper to your doorstep three days a week. On Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays, subscribers get a newspaper. The other four days? Buy it at the newsstand or read it online.

There have been rumblings throughout the industry that this model was being explored for Detroit’s hugely troubled metro newspapers. I suspect few believed it until the formal announcement today. The traditional mindset just can’t wrap its head around the idea that news wouldn’t be delivered seven days a week to the door.

Detroit’s plan is to deliver the newspaper three days a week, pump up single copy sales, offer an e-edition (full newspaper online); and beef up their Web sites. The strategies are bold ones, and Detroit, with little left to lose, may be the right place to test them. And, frankly, if Detroit doesn’t do this or some version of it, one or both of those newspapers might not be around much longer. Detroit is not the most thriving of cities, nor Michigan for that matter.

So, you ask, will Rockford do the same thing? Nah; not likely; not now; but maybe someday. We are not the same kind of market as Detroit. Look for the “do not deliver every day” models to spread first in the big cities. It could happen out of Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Philadelphia. All newspapers are hurting, but the metros are in serious hurt.

The pain of mid-sized papers, like Rockford, is a teensy headache compared with those metros. They’re cutting off their heads; we’re taking some serious pain relievers.  The day will come — and I have written about it many times — that we don’t do a printed newspaper everyday. Just not likely to be right away. But, I’m playing around with possibilities, just in case.

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6 Comments Add your own

  • 1. ben  |  December 17th, 2008 at 12:50 am

    Put the comics on the internet and I’ll be glad to cancel my subscription to the printed version if that will help with the great leap forward.

  • 2. Linda Grist Cunningham  |  December 17th, 2008 at 8:10 am

    You can find your comics online now if you’re willing to dig around the Web for them. Catch is, are you willing to pay the online subscription?

  • 3. Jim Phelps  |  December 17th, 2008 at 11:01 am

    Actually, I get both with print and digital with my subscription to the Wall Street Journal. I even by foreign news from the left-leaning German magazine -Der Spiegel – online, paying by EFT in Euros.

    And yes, I prefer to have a paper or the news only via the Web.

    Electrons are recyclable and all the stories are archived for retrieval at will.

    It sure beats running out to the driveway to get the morning news (hours late, of course) and I don’t have to wack a hundred trees in my lifetime as a greener consumer of news. It reduces my carbon-foot print and helps provide revenue for news producers by providing interesting content to the user in real time.

    Hopefully more newspapers will go this route and as an advertiser I spend zero dollars on print.

    However, I do spend money on digital.

  • 4. the dude abides  |  December 17th, 2008 at 12:36 pm

    Given the current model, why pay when I can have an RSS aggregator (netvibes, igoogle) show me all the news (or cartoons) I want, without pop up or banner ads, formatted how I like? Why even visit the news site?

    Rockford seems to never think bigger than Rockford. It seems that companies here think the entire world exists between i90 and Meridian, 173 and Samuelson (see: OTW music selection). The internet erases these borders. We need to start thinking in grander terms. You better believe that Chicago Sun Times is reaching out much further than northern IL (blagobusted.com).

    Selling news online surely has its challenges, but I hope you reconsider your stance. For once, it’d be nice to see Rockford do something that’s ahead of it’s time, instead of being 5 years behind the curve.

  • 5. Linda Grist Cunningham  |  December 17th, 2008 at 12:54 pm

    The “why pay” question is a simple one to answer. Today there are two primary costs to gathering, sorting and distributing news, information, and advertising: people and paper. If we drop paper (no more newspapers period) and go all digital, we still need the people who gather, sort and deliver news, information and advertising. Those three things don’t just happen — and if you think “volunteers,” like community bloggers will fill the hole on a consistent, long-term basis, you’re probably smoking something.

    And, here on the blog, which draws almost exclusively from those who choose digital over print, we’re all happy with versions of digital-only delivery. But out there in print reader land, there are tens of thousands more who aren’t ready yet to ditch their newspapers, whether it’s once a day or once a week.

    So, the solutions are not “either-or”; they’ll be a combination of print, online, holograms, e-editions and similar. And, don’t sell Rockford short, Dude. I know for a fact, because my staff and I are working on them, that there are plenty of innovative projects in the works in the News Tower. We’ve been doing things here for a decade that other newspapers and their Web sites didn’t bother with even this year.

  • 6. the dude abides  |  December 17th, 2008 at 1:56 pm

    Of course. And I understand why you want me to pay, but that doesn’t explain why I would pay, when I can get the same thing for free.

    Until you restrict access, or otherwise change the distribution method, there’s no motivation to pay.

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