Detroit Free Press

As newspapers continue to struggle with the bottom line, some organizations have finally come up with a new business plan. The Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News are changing to a hybrid approach to getting the news out.

Shrinking yet growing

Both newspapers are going to shrink a bit, meaning they will have fewer pages. The Detroit Free Press is heavily marketing freep.com and digitalfreepress.com, which are online sources of the newspaper’s content. Readers will be able to read and see the newspaper online every day instead of getting it delivered to their homes.

Why two sites?

The Detroit Free Press has two web sites because it is sharing news in two different formats. Freep.com is more like a traditional web site that most newspapers have. Digitalfreepress.com is a digital replica of the printed newspaper. Right now the sites are open to the public for free. However, if you don’t have any extra cash you might need to get a payday loan to view it in the future, when the Free Press will start charging for it.

Other changes

Both newspapers are also cut back home delivery to only three days a week. The Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press will only be delivered to homes on Thursday, Friday and Sunday.

Still daily

The newspapers will still print every day, but they will only be available in newspaper boxes and places of business on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday. The papers chose which day to deliver based on days when advertisers buy the most space. On the days when there is no home delivery, the number of copies printed will be cut from 500,000 to 200,000.

Other media changes

The Washington Post has made some changes, as well. Starting today the business section of the paper and the news section are one in the same. Instead of having a separate business section, the business news will appear in front section of the paper.

Getting together

The International Herald Tribune has merged its web site with the New York Times. Both newspapers have the same publisher. The Herald also redesigned its print edition.

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.

Related Articles

• Detroit papers chop home delivery
• Sun Media cutting 600 jobs
• Grim tidings for the news biz