A New Model from Detroit

Funny, office talk this morning was actually about different co-workers taking the daily local paper less, or not at all.

Though I suspect I may be in the minority, I would mourn the loss of a paper at least SOME of the week. The daily paper signifies for me things like: my son reading the sports daily as he eats breakfast, the Sunday paper strewn over the living room floor as each family member tackles their favorite section first thing Sunday morn, those few quiet minutes I take - either at the very beginning or very end of the day to hide behind the paper with my feet up on the ottoman and leisurely nose around the local happenings. An online edition, means having to sit at the computer - which I don't want at the breakfast table, don't have 5 of to distribute Sunday morning and after spending a good bit of the day otherwise attached to a computer at work, I like to vary my media fix with a newspaper - kind of like comfort food.

For myself, as well as my kids, I'm really not looking for more time spent in front of a screen. And my husband is NOT taking my laptop into the bathroom to catch up on the news.....!

Not a popular opinion I guess, but I'm sticking to it.

yeah i lament the loss of the paper paper but admit that i haven't gotten a daily paper for years, they just stacked up, and i check online at work... but then again my local paper sort of stinks on a daily basis. i am also obviously concerned that we're losing not the paper but the resources/people that will make the gathering and presenting of information from more than one syndicated source possible.

Yeah. I've never taken a print newspaper and have long believed that print media should transition to digital format. I don't understand the reluctance to look at a screen rather than a print paper - I know lots of older folks who complain that the print in the local paper is too small, the ink gets smudged, is hard to read, etc. My family didn't take a print paper when I was growing up, so I have no nostalgia for what we always considered wasteful and limited. But, my husband and I have always been quite content to have our home activities (and basically our lives) centered around our computer, and I know that lots of folks aren't there yet, or don't want to be. So, I guess I'm saying that I don't care about a forced transition to something I'm already doing anyway. I'm still upset about the switch to the "new Facebook" though, so I can empathize with folks who aren't happy with being forced to change something.

This is a fascinating development to me and my reaction has oscillated between huh, meh, and BOOOO!
.
I confess, I do not understand how this maneuver makes any sense at all from a business prespective. Putting out a paper daily but only delivering it 3days a week? Huh? You are going to lose subscriptions, especially if the cost of said subscription doesn't drop dramatically. This seems like such a blanat attempt to stave off the inevitable I'm not sure why one would even bother. I like to think it has something to do with not wanting to lay off more Detroiters (man that city sure does appear to be taking on the chin) but I have a feeling it has more to do with a lack of cajones on the management side.
.
Random aside, I just visited the Free Press website and it is awful. Perhaps the slow transition is to get their online house in order.
.
My apathy surfuced when I realized that I don't read or care about anything from the Detroit News/Free Press.
.
I do subscribe to 4 newspapers a day (THE Times , WSJ, NY Times, and USA Today). I subscribe to the WSJ online service as well, but simply speaking, newspapers online suck. Good newspaper articles have a significant legnth and reading one online is irksome, reading multiple becomes tedious. But while reading online is annoying, it is not nearly as frustrating as *finding* the good articles online.
.
Newspaper websites tend to have stupid sensationalized headlines that lead to one paragraph gossip crap, while they bury the "real" journalism 17 clicks away. It is the single most obnoxious thing online (maybe second to penis enlargement ads). If/when all newspapers go digital I will choose to be greatly less informed. Fascinating, less glitzy, stories (like yesterday with Bernard Medoff) will completely fall of my radar. News aggragator sites like Drudge and Huffpo are somewhat decent at helping find good scopes, but they are vastly inferior to the old fashioned flip through the paper and skim the headlines technique. As an example to illustrate, when I subscribed to Time magizine, I read weekly in its entirety. Now that I only read it online, I read one maybe two 'full' articles a week, at most.
.
If/when the day comes that the newspaper is an honest to goodness, anachronism, I will mourn. These aren't public telephone booths disappearing. It is something considerably more substantial.

I think there's a place for print and it'd be a shame if it's completely shut down. I think online is OK for a quick fix of news, as well as up-to-the-minute updates, but I find reading print much more enjoyable, especially for long articles. I read a lot online, but that's just a result of being in front of the computer all day for work and getting easily distracted. Plus, it's there. I can see why reducing the amount of days may seem to make sense, but ultimately the whole point is that papers are supposed to be daily. Cutting the days will just make people bail on the whole thing entirely.

I'm a 19-year-old college student who subscribes to five different print magazines just for the ability to read them in paper. Now that's not exactly a fair representation of the average media consumer (plus I'm a journalism student), but there's a market for print journalism. There may be more and more substitutes, but a paper magazine or newspaper will still have value. And I love my magazines, but I didn't pay more than $25 for any of the subscriptions, and I have no idea why anyone would subscribe to a newspaper at this point unless they're really, really wedded to that reading routine.

unless I'm reading this wrong, this is not about abandoning print; rather its about abandoning home delivery four days a week.

Which makes a great deal of sense in a lot of ways --- 'home delivery' is subsidized by advertisers, and it looks like the papers are restricting home delivery to those days on which advertisers most often try to reach the 'home' audience.
.
What I still can't figure out is why newspapers haven't figured out a way to market their web sites to local advertisers; indeed, 'hyper-local' targetting of readership is not merely doable, but makes good business sense....but it doesn't happen.
.
and re: Ashman's comment about bad website design -- this is key. One of the reasons that the New York Times site is so popular is that it focuses on national and international news. Most newspapers seem to have adopted a different, and anti-news, strategy -- that of becoming some kind of all-purpose "local" portal, with the primary focus on local "news" that looks more like the 'if it bleeds it leads' crap that local television news provides.
.
No doubt this is the result of some idiot consultant telling publishers what the web is all about (BLOGS! You gotta have BLOGS!), and thanks to these bad web strategies, most newspaper websites are not attracting the audience they need.

There are really only two reasons why I prefer paper to digital. One, convenience. The larger format of the paper makes the news much easier to scan - a must for people that don't have a lot of time to flip through each and every page. That you can look at the front page of say, the NY Times or the WSJ and can read four or five of the top stories right off the front page is something that can't be duplicated in digital, yet. You can also grab it in the morning and read it on the Subway, wireless access be damned! Two, nostalgia. I like being able to fold my paper (it's an art AND a science). I being able to touch and feel a newspaper. I like being able to do my crossword puzzle in ink. Don't like the ink so much though, but thats less and less an issue these days.

Other than convenience and nostalgia, for me I'm fairly indifferent to paper versus digital.

The answer is simple I suppose. Make better devices. If we could have a device that would come close to replicating and providing the experience of a newspaper, I'd be the first to move on.

I can't deny there's something sad about papers downsizing their print operations, but at the same time it seems inevitable. I tried subscribing to a newspaper when I moved a year ago -- it didn't last long. I get so much news through my RSS feed that subscribing to a print paper seems redundant and wasteful. (RSS feeds also take away the nuisance of having to click through individual papers' sites.)
.
For me, weekly or monthly magazines are different - the articles are relevant for longer, and therefore don't need to be read immediately. I'll admit to reading some magazines almost exclusively online, but there are others that I'm not going to be willing to give up in print anytime soon.

Test comment

[...] A New Model from Detroit [...]