Here in the Northwest, the largest daily papers in the region's two major markets - Seattle and Portland - announced within the past two weeks that they would shrink or merge sections and cut back on content in their papers. Two other local papers, the Tacoma News Tribune and the Bend Bulletin, announced similar changes.
Today, Nieman Journalism Lab picked up on the Wall Street Journal report that the publisher of the major Detroit daily - the Free Press - will announce Tuesday that the newspaper will halt deliver on all but the three most profitable days of the week: Thursday, Friday and Sunday. Readers presumably will be encouraged to pick up the paper at newsstands or read the paper online.
Last week Tribune declared bankruptcy, in what could be a ghost-of-Christmas future for other struggling newspaper companies.
The decision to halt delivery of a major news daily would be a watershed announcement, and could lead to copycat decisions elsewhere. Shocking as the decision might be to newspaper veterans, the alternative is worse.
At a recent media conference, I was joined on the lunch panel by the former managing editor of the Spokane Spokesman review, who noted that only 17 cents of every dollar of newspaper spending goes to the content. The rest of that is burned up primarily in production (printing) and delivery (distribution) costs.
These 20th century sunk costs simply cannot be offset in a 21st-century business environment, and they are crushing a business already suffering from the 'Craigslist effect' of lost classifieds revenue.
Drastic times require drastic measures. Although newspapers will certainly have to make rate concessions to their advertisers to the extent that they halt delivery or publication of some days' papers, this approach is worth trying. As we noted at that same journalism conference, the "production and distribution" costs of the online version of a newspaper are almost zero.
That's a business model for journalism that has a future.
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