Dayscrapping Starts to Look Like a 2009 Model
Important Details: Detroit’s two newspapers, published under a joint operating agreement between Gannett and MediaNews, sent a shock through the newspaper world just before Christmas. The Free Press and the News announced that:
- The Free Press will be home-delivered only on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays, while The News will be home-delivered only on Thursdays and Fridays, both starting in March.
- The papers will print one-section street editions on the days of no home delivery.
- The papers will offer daily replica e-editions, associating them with the new three-day-a-week subscriptions.
- There will be no immediate newsroom layoffs, but overall job cuts would reach about 10%.
In making the announcement, Detroit Media Partnership CEO Dave Hunke made a stark acknowledgment: “…If we don’t do this, the current model is unsustainable. So we’d rather take the calculated risk of going to a new format — rather than sit back and do incremental cutbacks.”
The Detroit announcement, the first from major metro papers, is redefining the very nature of the “daily paper”. Daily newspapers are clearly becoming something less than … daily.
Consider the flurry of recent dayscrapping announcements. The East Valley Tribune, a suburban daily east of Phoenix, dropped two days of publication recently (see Insights 12 November 2008, The Promise and Perils of Flipping the Switch).
This week, The Klamath Falls (Or.) Herald and News dropped its Monday edition, saying it will “move most of the Monday content into the Sunday paper and discontinue delivering the Monday paper. A ‘Monday on Sunday’ section will include the Monday comics, puzzles and feature stories. ‘Hard news’ stories and sports coverage will continue to be posted on our Web site (www.heraldandnews.com) and will appear in the Tuesday paper.”
Starting next week, beleagured GateHouse‘s Independence (Mo.) Examiner will likewise drop its Monday paper, while Gatehouse’s neighboring Kansas City Kansan, a long-time daily suburban paper, is discontinuing its print edition altogether, after moving from daily to twice-weekly earlier in 2008.
At the end of the month, the Sun-Times Media Group‘s Elgin Courier will drop its Saturday print edition in favor of a “weekend edition”. For its part, leading news publisher Gannett is dropping its Monday and Tuesday classified sections at its large Cincinnati Enquirer metro.
As a backdrop to this phenomenon of scrapping days of publication, publishers saw a new Pew survey that indicated that more Americans are now getting their news from the internet (40%) than from print (35%) for the first time.
Implications: Outsell believes that dayscrapping is a key phenomenon worth studying. Most importantly, it breaks the business model dam — one size does not fit all. For longer than anyone running newspapers can recall, papers all did the same thing, published whole daily editions, with sections fairly consistent from day to day, offering home delivery and newsstand sales. Monday wasn’t much different than Thursday, and Sunday was bigger in size but similar in format. In UK and Europe, of course, readers have gotten used to combined Saturday-Sunday weekend papers, but that model never caught on much in the US.
Now the various iterations of dayscrapping, and cutting back home delivery or print classifieds publishing, are forcing publishers to do closer analysis and rethinking of their businesses. In that analysis, they’re likely to find out much more about the real needs and flexibilities of marketers and more about how changing reader habits can best be accommodated through retweaked print/digital offerings. In that analysis, they are likely to find better answers in the two areas they need to focus on in 2009:
- Significantly cutting back non-editorial, non-advertising sales costs in line with a poor first-half (at least) 2009 ad revenue picture;
- Finding new models of what’s best for digital and what’s best for print, according to reader and marketer wants and evolving habits. That’s an ongoing battle, but by breaking the dam, more informed experimentation is likely to follow.