The rumors could be a sad reality very soon:
The Gannett-controlled publisher of the Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News (2,000 employees) would end home delivery entirely, except for perhaps two or three days a week: Thursday, Friday and Sunday editions.
Readers would be encouraged to subscribe to already-available electronic pdf editions of the Freep and The News.
It seems that the adviser on this whole mess is a Silicon Valley consulting firm called IDEO.
More details of this madness are here and here.
The idea is not new.
Yesterday, I had a conference call with a group of executives from a large U.S. newspaper chain and they posed the same question:
There will come a day, let’s say 10 to 15 years from now, when it’s no longer economically feasible to print and deliver a daily newspaper to subscribers’ homes. How will we operate? What should we be doing today to prepare for that eventuality? Should we be attempting to accelerate it?
During our discussion, one of the questions that came up was: what if we publish print editions only a few days a week?
This was my response:
You cannot survive by offering the print product only a few days a week.
Reading a print newspaper is a daily habit.
If you want to survive, you need to produce a “necessary newspaper” not an “occasional newspaper.”
U.S. newspapers are lost, confused and in the hands of publishers and managers who don’t want to invest in the future.
Don’t want to invest in journalism.
Don’t want to innovate.
Don’t want to compete.
This is lack of vision.
Lack of faith in change.
Just greed, greed, greed.
In a few hours I’ll post this in English, but for now, here is my analysis of the U.S. newspaper crisis in an essay written three months ago and published in the journal of the Newspaper Press Association of Madrid.
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