Two major Detroit newspapers in need of extra cash are putting an end to daily home delivery. Too bad payday loans can’t help them out. The Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News will continue to print every day, but home delivery will be limited to three days a week.
- Image by Getty Images via Daylife
It’s a trend that’s sweeping the nation. If it weren’t a conflict of interest, the newspaper industry might be the next to ask the Feds for a bailout. Newspaper readership has steadily declined as the availability of news on the Internet has increased. Add that to a historically weak economy, and you have yourselves a crisis.
One woman’s opinion
Newspapers, once a staple at the average family’s breakfast table, are slowly and painfully becoming obsolete. From coast to coast, the inky smell of newsprint is becoming a thing of the past. How and why is this happening?
The obvious reason is the rise of the Internet. That explains the deteriorating need for printing presses. But the demand for news, information and entertainment is just as high as ever. And newspapers have web sites. So why are newspapers hemorrhaging money like crazy? Why are hundreds of journalists being laid off every day?
The answer, according to yours truly: technologically, newspapers fell behind the curve.
Newspapers haven’t changed their marketing plan to adjust to the new ways in which readers gather news. A lot of newspapers are coming around, making extra cash on their web sites and coming up with ways to deliver increasingly personalized news. But it may be too late.
Children of the Internet
The generation of readers that society is cultivating right now heads straight to the computer for everything. Need payday loans? Apply online. Need a recipe? Google it. Want to know the definition of a word? I guarantee you, it’d be tough to find out when the last time a person younger than 40 picked up a dictionary. We look it up online.
But I always use the same online dictionary. I go to Merriam-Webster online because I trust it. I was raised with it. I was trained at a young age to regard Merriam-Webster as a reliable, accurate source for word definition. My reliance on Merriam-Webster hasn’t changed. The way I access it has.
This is where newspapers fail. Adults nowadays were once children at the breakfast table listening to Dad’s commentary on the news of the day. We remember the name of that newspaper. We remember it as a good source of information, because if Dad trusted it, it must be good, right?
But it’s no longer in our format. If newspaper web sites were as well organized, easy to use and thorough as Google News, many of us would rather visit our local paper’s web site. But many newspapers still charge a subscription fee for their web sites. The money they are making on those subscriptions is a tiny fraction of what they could make on ad revenue if they generated the kind of traffic that online search giants get every day. But during the gap when newspapers started dedicating resources to their web sites and the time that we grew up and started reading news, we turned away. We found free, user-friendly sites that met all our news needs.
Another one bites the dust
So, to this Child of the Internet, the decrease in daily home delivery does not come as a surprise. In fact, the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press have given me hope that newspapers are indeed accepting the fact that they need to find new ways of doing business.
Perhaps someday local news operations will again have the money to maintain staffs full of well-educated, well-trained reporters and editors. In the meantime, laid-off journalists who get jobs writing blog posts about the downfall of newspapers can qualify for payday loans.
It is a new era with Internet, I don’t know the last time I actually spent the time to read a newspaper. It is going out of style to read a newspaper that uses up trees when you can get on your computer and search what ever it is you want to see.
I also use the internet(CNN)for all of my news. However, I grew up with a newspaper in my hand and still love to read it in this way. I hope that even with modern technology, there will continue to be newspapers printed. There is nothing like reading it off the printed page!!
Very good point I do still think they should make newspapers because it is still very useful for many people!
The digital age has definitely changed the way people do things. The way we take in news has definitely changed, and the author is right – I also use the online Merriam Webster. (Oxford English makes you pay for access – jerks.) The “analog” newspaper seems unnecessary when you can just jump on the laptop and browse headlines for free, instead of actually having to pay some paperboy for them.
Tell me about it. It appears children are a lot more advanced than many adults are in regards to new technology. Internet is a global demand as more people have cut off their old-fashion ways to communicate and route to a more convenient short-cut. You’re definitely right. If people want anything, whether it’s a car or a need to advertise, they will naturally jump right to the computer.