On Tuesday, the Detroit Media Partnership, operator of the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News, announced that daily home delivery of both newspapers would cease in Spring of 2009. Delivery will still be available to subscribers on Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday, the days commanding the highest readership, and thus highest advertising fees. A shorter, roughly 32-page paper will be available at newsstands throughout metropolitan Detroit each day. Subscribers will be able to access an electronic edition of each day's paper, a replica of the printed edition, in which users can "flip" through the pages and read the articles in their "paper" format.
Press Release.
With newspapers facing declining circulation amid adverse demographic trends, why should anyone care if newspapers stop home delivery?
There's more...
Is the move by the Free Press and News, ninth in the nation in combined weekly circulation a harbinger of things to come? And, why again, you ask does any of this matter in the digital age?
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Growing up as the son of an auto-worker in metro-Detroit during the 1990s, I fondly recall reading one of the papers each day. I would read the Front Page, and my younger brother would tear through (literally and literately) the Sports section. We would furiously trade sections before leaving for school, sometimes making it through most of the stories, and others coming home to put the sections back in order to finish reading where we left off. While reading, my eyes would dart from the story I was currently reading to a paragraph in an adjacent piece, and this would continue until I had read the big points from each article. In a sense, the way that I browse the web for news today is a derivative of how I learned to read news in print. Except now I click from story to story instead of flipping physical pages. However, the web offers many features physical newsprint does not - the most obvious benefit being ease of gathering different viewpoints on the same story, from individuals to other large media outlets. But what do printed papers offer that the web cannot offer? And how does that play into the newspaper's death march drum-roll constantly sounded across the blogosphere and here?
To begin, the Detroit Media Parternship's move is not the most radical in the industry. The Christian Science Monitor was the first major paper in the country to announce a shift to electronic editions, eliminating its printed paper. Another strategy, implemented by the New York Times is to introduce an electronic version while continuing to print, allowing themselves an escape valve. The third strategy, being used by the Free Press and the News, continues to print while easing their way into the digital age. All are different paths to the same outcome, the seemingly inevitable death of the printed newspaper.
The shifts underlying these changes are clear. More people, especially younger folk, get their news from the internet. But where on the internet? One of the many places they get the news on the internet is from... you guessed it, newspapers!
From the Kansas City Star
In fact, our news and advertising content has never been more popular. Our print edition attracts 1 million local readers a week, a number which has dropped only 2 percent in the last eight years. That gives The Star a market penetration in the top five among large papers in the country.
Online, The Star is reaching even more readers. A wealth of local content, including video and more breaking news than any other source, has made KansasCity.com far and away the region’s top Web site. More than 4 million visitors locally, nationally and internationally visited us in October alone, and online readership continues to grow at double-digit pace.
So, 1 million print readers weekly (surely some of those readers are counted more than once), and 4 million online readers weekly. I might be going out on a limb here, but I believe that similar numbers would hold up for most newspapers across the country. The result is newspapers have more online readers than print readers, as web users look to different newspapers for different views on the same topic. It seems that many of the stories diaried about here, on DailyKos, often reference the online version of a newspaper. From a business perspective, the readership source numbers indicate that the newspapers must turn to the new market to sustain and grow their business, even if that means that their current model must change. The challenge for all newspapers over the coming decades will be to sustain their organizations with fees from online advertising, instead of print advertising. The ones that succeed in digital advertising will survive, while the others will slowly vanish.
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Why do people turn to newspaper's websites for news? Why not just look to other sources? The answers to these questions are complex. First, they depend on who you ask:
Again, the Kansas City Star
Bloggers, talk radio hosts, TV pundits and ideologues on both ends of the spectrum all can entertain and inform. But only the local newspaper has the staff, responsibility and ethics policies to carefully gather the facts and present them in an objective format so that citizens, working together, can tackle the problems that threaten our communities or endanger our democracy.
But then you get online editions of newspapers doing things like this. Instances of newspapers changing online editions abound, and commonly pop up here on the front page of DailyKos and other blogs. However, this is something that happens on blogs and newspaper websites because in the era of electronic media, it is easy to edit a story. How, or even if, that edit is disclosed is a matter of policy which varies from organization to organization.
People go to newspaper websites because newspapers have decades, and sometimes centuries of reputation to back up the integrity of their journalism. Also, the fact that a story is printed on paper indicates that at least one or two other people read the story, edited it, and then paid to print it. These layers of checks and balances don't formally exist in many places on the internet (yet), but the places that are known to have them are newspapers.
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Ok, so people read more newspapers online than they do in print. Why does it matter if the newspapers stop printing actual papers? And aren't you overreacting?
There is certainly part of me that will be nostalgic for the loss of home delivery of the local paper. Yes, I can make a special trip out to pick one up (on Mon, Tue, Wed, Sat) - but that's not the same as drinking a cup of coffee while pouring over the paper. Especially since today, once you get to work, some of the news you read in the morning may have been updated.
Nostalgia aside. IF the moves by the Detroit Media Partnership indicate a beginning of the end of printed, physical newspapers, then there is a risk that part of our history will be lost. No you say, we'll still have our history. It's all online! Just google it!
Let me explain where I am coming from. As an undergraduate, I majored in History. I then had the unique opportunity after college to actually work in my field. That's right, I graduated with a degree in History, and then went to work researching the past. (And yes, what the career counselors tell you about the average salary of a history degree right out of undergrad is true).
Our work focused on the early 20th century, an era in which cities often had multiple newspapers, printing up to five editions a day. Today, a two newspaper town like Detroit, is hard to come by. In this climate, one of the great sources for societal context was newspapers. The stories were updated throughout the day, and were in a sense, similar to the content that you get online today. Except there is one major difference. That material is printed. Most of the early 20th century newspapers, and other newspapers saved for posterity are microfilmed, a much better storage medium than acidic newsprint. A small minority of libraries and library groups are beginning to digitize their holdings. But the process is expensive and time consuming. Yes, the New York Times and other major dailies have their stories archived going back to the 1800's... and Google is starting a program to digitally archive all of that microfilm, but it is still a very daunting task.
It is possible that all newspapers will be digitally archived one day. But, what about archiving all of the news stories generated electronically? Even with reputable resources like Lexis Nexis, ProQuest, and others, the sheer volume of data on the web makes it incredibly difficult to perform accurate, historical research of source documents. The Internet Archive is one hope, but it is unclear how historians will react to sources that come across only on a computer screen.
This might seem silly to some. However, in academic history circles, your work is only as good as your sources. And if you do not have a printed, paper copy of your source that you can refer another researcher to, your career will be very short. So, as newspapers begin to wind down their printing operations, in the future, when historians look for context of the early 21st century, they might be lucky and have some sort of archive, where stories and blog posts are permanently kept and accessible; or they may link to a source, only to refer to it 6 months later and find the link to be a dead end. The outcome of these changes will determine how history is written.
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And so, as technology continues to shape our world as it has since the beginning of man, trade-offs exist with every choice, be it an evolutionary decision, a personal decision, a business decision, or a societal/market decision. The Detroit Free Press' and The Detroit News' decisions to curtail printing and the size of their printed product mark another step toward the eventual extinction of the printed newspaper. Along the way, one can hope that newspapers remain in some form electronically. Or one can hope that they disappear forever, leaving in their wake a news market dominated by opinions.
Think of a time with no newspapers in print or online, and rather, only partisan websites such as DailyKos, Drudge Report, FreeRepublic, Huffington Post, etc., exist. Where would these sites get their source stories from? Surely, there has been a great increase in the amount of electronic media pursuing original stories (e.g. 538.com's series The Road to 270), but will it ever surpass that of the newspapers? Will people be able to trust the work?
Of course they can trust the work. They can trust it just as much as they trust any story in any printed newspaper - with the pinch of reality and a dash of skepticism. And, in the end, Historians will have to modify they way that they find, access, analyze, and use references in their work. However, the risk with a completely partisan media (which you may argue and many will agree, clearly exists in today's Mainstream Media) is it's ability to divide the populous. There are great arguments on each side of whether or not such division is beneficial to the nation. Does it sow discord and apathy? Or does it promote a competition of ideas? How about a bit of both.
But the morning printed paper, delivered to your doorstep, brings everyone together. It provides a base of knowledge, upon which everyone can expand upon at their leisure. It brings everyone together when you spill coffee on it (or maybe a little bit of milk from your cereal bowl). Then at lunch, when you are finishing that great article on page C9, you look up, across the table to see another newspaper staring back at you, with a similar stain (although that coffee must have had more milk in it, based on the discoloration). The co-worker, across the table, having heard your paper rustling, peers out from behind their stained copy of the local paper. You both notice that your coffee stains are on the same page. You both smile, as you now have something to talk about, be it your clumsiness or the article, without having to worry about being flamed online.
And so, until I can spill coffee on my laptop (or future news-reading device) without having to buy a new one, I will continue to read the printed newspaper. When I pull out the historic papers that I have kept for posterity, and show them to my children and grandchildren, and they ask, "Where are those today? I want to learn more about..." Hopefully I can point them to a source, perhaps in a library, perhaps online, where I know that our societal conscience has been preserved, without revison revision.