Reduced newspaper delivery: Smart or death knell?
- Newspaper advertising is concentrated on certain days
- Less-than-daily publication can help conserve cash
- But cutting home delivery could drive away print customers
On Friday, The Post-Standard in Syracuse, N.Y., will become the latest daily newspaper to go less-than-daily when it reduces its home delivery schedule to three days a week.
It will hardly be the last.
It's just too tempting. And it may just make sense.
As newspapers struggle to stay afloat in the digital era, the notion of stopping or sharply reducing publication on days with little advertising is an option to consider.
"It's not a question of whether, it's a question of when," says Alan Mutter, an entrepreneur and former newspaper editor who writes the Reflections of a Newsosaur blog. "Everyone is thinking about it," he adds, "wondering when to pull the trigger."
Says Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute, "This is hardly coming out of the blue. People have been talking about it for six or seven years. Some people think this is the death knell for newspapers, but it actually might be quite the opposite."
The advantages are obvious. At most newspapers, advertising is concentrated on several days, often Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. On the days when it's light, the papers lose money. Rather than subsidize those skinny cash drains, why not use the money to bolster the paper's profitability and invest in a digital future?
The risk, of course, is driving off the remaining print customers. Media consumption is very much a matter of habit. If there's no paper on Tuesday, or if you have to forage to find one at a newsstand (and it's a thin edition with very little in it), you might begin to question why you're still getting it at all. And while the future may be digital, newspapers are still heavily dependent on print advertising.
The company that has been in the vanguard of the less-than-daily movement is the Newhouse family's Advance Publications. It embarked on its digital-first strategy in Ann Arbor, Mich., in 2009, cutting back print publication of the Ann Arbor News to two days a week and focusing on its website, annarbor.com.
It has since adopted similar approaches at its other properties in Michigan and at papers in Louisiana, Alabama, Pennsylvania and (starting Friday) New York.
It was in Louisiana that the less-than-daily movement came to the nation's attention last May, and not in a good way. When Advance decided to go digital-first at TheTimes-Picayune in New Orleans and reduce print publication to three days a week, New Orleans residents and Times-Pic staffers learned about the plan (which included massive layoffs) not from the company but from David Carr of The New York Times.
The result was a public relations disaster that Advance was ill-prepared to counter. Battered New Orleans, which had seen the paper as a lifeline in the post-Katrina era, erupted in outrage. It also didn't help that the company had launched a digital-first foray with a website that was universally derided.
Randy Siegel, Advance's president for local digital strategy, doesn't dispute that the company made mistakes in the Big Easy. "I wish it had unfolded in a more seamless fashion," he says. But he is convinced that Newhouse is on the right track.
In a telephone interview, Siegel outlined the evolution of Advance's digital-first strategy. The company's newspapers, like papers everywhere, were steadily losing readers and advertising dollars to computers and tablets and mobile phones. And there was no reason to think that would ever change. All of the growth opportunities were on the digital side. Even though the papers weren't on the verge of going out of business, it was time to change the "trajectory" of the company.
"If you just ride out a decline, that's not a path to survival," he says, adding, "Perpetuating the status quo was not an option."
And to compete effectively in the digital world is not cheap. So this, he says, was the money question: Do you publish daily newspapers that bleed cash three or four or five days a week when you need capital to invest in digital?
Siegel hastens to add that while the focus will be increasingly digital, Newhouse sees newspapers as an important weapon in the company's information arsenal for quite some time. "Print will be a big part of the picture longer than the pundits predict," he says. He declined to say whether the company's dailies in Cleveland and Portland, Ore., will soon embrace the digital-first approach.
While newspapers have found digital dollars hard to come by, Siegel doesn't believe that will always be the case. "Digital revenue growth potential is unlimited," he says.
Siegel says he sees encouraging signs, but it's awfully early in the process. Ultimately, he says, the company will be judged not only by its financial success but by the quality of its journalism. He mentions that since the layoffs last spring, TheTimes-Picayune has hired more journalists. After our conversation, he sends me links to stories about journalism awards won by Newhouse'sMLive Media Group in Michigan and a column by Times-Picayune Editor Jim Amoss touting some of the paper's recent accomplishments.
One thing is clear: Many newspaper executives will be closely watching Advance's digital initiatives. Abandoning daily publication or home delivery is a difficult decision. "If they see the end result is that there's a paper still there" doing watchdog reporting, API's Rosenstiel says, it will make it easier for others to follow suit.
However it turns out, media analyst and American Journalism Review columnist John Morton gives Advance props for making a bold move.
"What Newhouse is doing is a very brave effort to embrace the future," he says. "Whether it's smart remains to be seen."
Rieder is editor and senior vice president of American Journalism Review.