So. It begins.
The inevitable shift away from daily print newspapers in large metro areas starts in depressed Detroit. And because it is Detroit, the execs making the change are doing it wrong.
You don’t sell online access as part of your subscription you dopes. Subscription covers the cost of printing and delivering the paper — or should. You give away your content online in order to attract eye-balls, eye-balls you then sell to advertisers. The more you can breakout and identify those eye-balls via opt-in relationships, the more advertisers will pay. This is not hard to figure out.
Yet in Detroit they are not even idling presses on “off” days. Instead they will print “abbreviated” editions. I guarantee that is some labor union hang-over that basically mandates that the presses run everyday, no matter what. People will watch what Detroit does and learn the wrong lessons, I guarantee.
In McClatchy-land, I doubt any of the Carolinas dailies will cut back soon. In fact, of the company’s 30 dailies, I expect one in California would be the first to scale back. The Modesto Bee just had its publisher quit to go to work for a solar panel installer.
Progress.
