Thirteen months ago, they announced they would limit home delivery to only three days a week - Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays. Otherwise, it would be available online in two ways:
There is the conventional site with lists of stories, which anyone can access for free, or a special subscriber-only digital edition, which looks like the actual newspaper itself - but which is hard to read unless you have a very big monitor. As an incentive to readers to accept this radical change, the cost for subscribing to this hybrid paper is less than the cost had been for daily home delivery.
Now the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press are still printing a newspaper every day, though they are vastly shrunken versions of the product they used to put out. They won’t deliver it to you, but you can go get one from, say, the corner gas station.
And that’s exactly what people who wanted a paper began doing. This seemed to annoy the publishers, so in October they doubled the price of a single copy of the paper, from fifty cents to a dollar. That did drive some customers away.
The group that runs the papers, the Detroit Media Partnership, said they sold 28 percent fewer copies, but took in more revenue.
Or so they said. Well, this week we got some hard evidence as to how the great newspaper experiment is going, and the results are quite clear. What they are doing in Detroit is a howling failure.
Now, it should be said that newspapers everywhere are doing poorly, thanks to the economy, the Internet, and changing reader habits. Much of the classified advertising that was their economic lifeblood has vanished, or gone to free Internet sites.
Worse, their readership has been plummeting. Now, the statistics show the Great Detroit Newspaper Experiment hasn’t improved the situation; it has made it worse.
Nationally, newspaper circulation over the last six months declined by 8.7 percent.
Circulation on Sunday fell by six and a half percent. But the Detroit papers lost almost twice as many readers.
Ironically, the Detroit Free Press, which dominates the media partnership lost more readers than the News, which is now clearly and legally a second-class citizen. The two papers are run by a partnership, or “Joint Operating Agreement” that is almost entirely controlled by Gannett, the company that owns the Free Press.
Naturally, the media partnership tried to put the best face on this they could. Rich Harshbarger, vice president of consumer marketing, was quoted as saying “these numbers were forecasted and planned for.” Maybe so. But they were saying something different just six months ago. Then, they were talking about being profitable by the end of this year. Nobody was saying that yesterday.
Part of the problem is clearly this. The most loyal and devoted newspaper readers are people over the age of 55. People that age don’t want to read newspapers on the internet. Many of them just won’t. Twenty years from now, converting newspaper readers to the internet shouldn’t be a problem. Whether either of Detroit’s papers will still be around then, however, is a good question.
I take your point but would like to add that both Freep and News web pages are very well done. I find the user interface easy to navigate. The quality of the writing and coverage is still there.
Posted by: Bduinkerken | May 03, 2010 at 09:35 AM