The Internet, the last hope of newspapers
(Credit:
The Detroit Free Press)
A "bold transformation" is how The Detroit News and The Detroit Free Press are trying to spin their decision to limit home delivery of their newspapers to three days a week.
While both said Tuesday that they will continue to issue traditional newspapers at newsstands seven days a week, they are the first daily newspapers from a major city to cutback home delivery.
"The dynamics of delivering information to audiences has changed forever due to technology," said a jointly released statement from the papers. "The economics of the newspaper business demand change to survive."
The way the press release reads, The Free Press and the News are jumping out ahead of what will soon be the next step in the evolution of newspapers. Wrong, says Alan D. Mutter, a former journalist who is now managing partner of Tapit Partners, a group of information-technology consultants. He says the papers had run out of options and were down to two: Either jump to the Web or close.
"The decision to abandon seven-day home delivery in Detroit was not a bold strategic initiative but a last-ditch effort to save two failing newspapers," Mutter wrote on his blog Newsosaur.
Mutter quoted an unnamed former executive from Gannett, parent company of the Free Press, who claimed to have knowledge of management discussions from last summer. "They cut all they could," Mutter's source told him. "We saw the papers as continuing to deteriorate--and that was before Lehman Brothers (and the economy collapsed)."
By all indications, the Detroit papers, and The Christian Science Monitor, which announced that it planned to stop printing papers on a daily basis starting in April, are trying to save themselves from reader apathy and disappearing ad revenue by migrating to the Web.
After reading the news about the Detroit papers, online of course, I remembered the day a computer with Web access was first brought to the office of one of my editors at The Los Angeles Times--a newspaper whose parent company, The Tribune Co., filed for bankruptcy earlier this month. That was more than 10 years ago. Even then there were people telling my editor and the rest of the newspaper industry that the Internet would one day drastically alter the way people obtained information. My editor didn't believe it and plenty of others in the business didn't either.
Now, the only hope for newspapers is if they can make a business out of online publishing. Nothing is for certain.
Sitting in front of his new computer that day many years ago, my editor appeared annoyed and told me, "This is just another fad, Greg."
Greg Sandoval covers media and digital entertainment for CNET News. He is a former reporter for The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. E-mail Greg, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/sandoCNET. 
Physical delivery of words printed on cheap paper (c'mon, "Yellow Press" did have a source, y'know) was once the one and only way to get any news --reliably and complete-- from one physical location to another in bulk.
It's had a good run... for what, 500+ years now? But that run appears to be ending.
for some things, printing will certainly always have a niche that no one can dislodge (a biggie: Books), because decently-printed paper still has a higher longevity and no power requirements.
Case in point: I was given a rather awesome gift for my birthday this past summer: it was a serious scientific treatise, written in the mid 1800's (including illustrated 'plates') about what other planets were like. Note that this was back when folks assumed that outer space wasn't a hard vacuum, but simply held a different gas. The huge variety of bad and mis-guessed assumptions would make a modern astrophysicist laugh, but back in those days this was all they had to go on. I find the book a treasure because it marks very well just how much progress we (the human race) have all made in the field. In spite of the gross inaccuracies, it tends to inspire flights of imagination at times, and it gives some pretty good insight and creative sparks at times.
Given this, I sincerely doubt that such assumptions and speculations made today would be allowed to linger for 150+ years, no?
Anyways - sure, newspapers by and large are too ephemeral to worry about printing them every day these days, no?
As the years have gone by and technology for implementing my suggestions has become better and cheaper, that newspaper has gone downhill, laying off staff, going through several ownership changes, reducing printed page size, getting "local stories" from the staff of an allied newspaper several scores of miles away (to be fair, the other paper sometimes runs stories generated by my hometown newspaper, but not as often), relocating to cheaper facilities out of town and switching to printers much further out of town -- in general, becoming a distant, pale shadow of its original self. Maybe someday they will get with the program, but I'm betting it won't be until they are completely swallowed by that out-of-town newspaper and remain as just a logo on a regional edition of the other newspaper.
"...to the level of writting. "
"Any joe can write garbage."
Ouch. Let's put that in the awkward file, Joe.
Try Safari. It has a built in spell checker for form fields.
- by vlabmarketing May 17, 2009 8:35 PM PDT
- There is an interesting talk at Stanford on Tuesday, May 19th 2009 titled ?News in the 21st Century: Who Reads Print Anymore??. Panelists include Guy Kawasaki, Rob Curley, Norm Fogelsong and others! Check ?em out at http://www.vlab.org/article.html?aid=271
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