More on Detroit: Changing Habits

I don't really agree with my pal Alan Mutter's analysis last week of the Detroit newspapers' decision to drastically cut back on home delivery, but I was particularly astonished by a clueless quote it included from a (mercifully) unnamed former Gannett circulation executive:

"Once you get readers out of the every-day habit of reading a paper, you will lose them forever," the exec told Alan. "When you break someone's daily habit, he will go to other media for news and information. If the newspaper only shows up on Thursday and Sunday, your customers will lose the newspaper habit and change to another medium."

Oh, puh-leeze. That thinking is entirely ass-backwards. Guys like this former bean-counter are proof that newspapers are still living a fantasy that their products are the centers of their customers' news and information universe. That may have been true two or three or four decades ago, but it ain't true now. 

It's simply not that reducing home delivery will drive readers to other sources of news: They're already there! They've been making the switch for years, relying more on the Web for news of all kinds, from myriad sources, along with TV and other alternatives. Few newspaper readers–and sorry, but it's an unattractive older demographic–still slavishly read the printed paper every day; many just don't have time to get to it, and let it pile up in a corner for recycling, unread (or barely glanced at). Why else do you think newspaper circulation has been steadily sinking while population has been growing? Advertisers, incidentally, understand this better than newspapers, and are voting with their feet. Print may be a better source of revenue than online for now, but that print ad revenue is in freefall, and most newspapers simply aren't trying hard enough to find smarter ways to bring advertisers online to replace the print dollars.

The Detroit move is radical, to be sure. It may or may not be enough to save the papers there, as Mutter further examines today. But it simply reflects reality. And if it does drive readers from print to online, then that's a good thing, because online is where the future is. The sooner the newspaper industry truly understands that–and begins paying truly serious attention to promoting online and working hard to find innovative sources of revenue online–the sooner the transition to the inevitable future will take place. Sorry, print junkies. That's just reality. Clinging to an obsolete notion of the printed newspaper's role in information delivery is fantasy.

Comments

[Martin Langeveld]

Mark, You are totally correct about Mutter's former (perhaps for good reason) circ exec.

No circulation manager I've ever met could understand why it was a good idea to put any news, whatsoever, online for free.

Meanwhile, most of them tried any avenue they could think of to give away (or otherwise get rid of) printed newspapers and still have them count as paid under ABC rules.

[Angela Connor]

Whoa! I agree with you there Mark. That must be one of the dumbest quotes I've read in a while. Way to dissect it. It's like the old thinking (well still current for some newspaper sites) that linking to competitors is the wrong thing to do. Reminds me of the thought process at my old paper that people would put down the paper to head to the computer to the online refer that we went out of our way to make sure got printed, complete with it's own redirect in many cases.