With advertising in the tank and recovery still a distant dream, at least in Detroit, the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News are looking elsewhere for a revenue boost.
Executives at the papers told me last week that they hope to double the revenue they receive from readers, shifting the traditional newspaper revenue split from 80 percent advertising and 20 percent circulation to 60-40 as part of their reduced home delivery plan.
It’s a strategy that raises critical questions about the future of advertising. (My friend and former Free Press colleague Kirk Cheyfitz argues that the papers need to reinvent advertising before giving up on it).
And as circulation continues to drop industrywide, a trend analyzed today by my Poynter colleague Rick Edmonds, getting the remaining readers to pay more for the same (or less) news doesn’t look very promising without significant product improvements.
As a reporter and editor at the Free Press for nearly 20 years between 1972 and 1992, I admit to a personal stake in the Detroit papers’ survival efforts. Since I was in Detroit on Friday and Saturday, I got a chance to do some personal — and quite unscientific — market research on how things are going.
Sometimes anecdotes can be telling, as you’ll see in the reference below to the Oakland Press, which showed up Monday with the third-biggest circulation gain in the nation among papers of 50,000 or more.
The Walsh family subscribes to The New York Times, but it’s not popular with Mitch and his sisters, Madeleine, 12, and Lanie, 8. The kids refer to the Times as “the dark and scary paper” and insist its front page is too consumed with news of war and financial woes to suit their overall tastes in news.
Mitch does use the Times app on his iPhone, though, and asks why the Free Press doesn’t offer one and — unlike the Times — charge for it.
“I’d pay for that,” he insisted the other night as his Dad, Matt, raised his eyebrows as if to ask where the money would come from. “Well maybe not on a monthly basis,” Mitch added, “but I would pay $3 or $4 for a one-time fee for an app.”
I suspect he’s on to something. My conversations in Detroit (and in Ann Arbor earlier in the week) suggest that readers resistant to traditional price hikes might pony up for improvements to their news experience.
Last April, when I reviewed the first month of the Detroit experiment, my daughter Maleita looped me into a Facebook discussion with some of her friends. I went back to a couple of them last week to see how the Detroit papers are faring in their households:
Melissa Hechlik Corsi
: We did receive the Detroit Free Press on the delivery days for a while, but then we had a “glitch” with delivery and [my husband] Paul decided to switch to the Oakland Press. We now receive the Oakland Press and the paper is read by 3 members of our family. The paper doesn’t cover an extended scope of news, but we do know more about the “goings on” in our community! I have noticed Paul looking online to catch up on news when he can … he is still a big NPR/BBC radio listener while traveling in the car. When we’re up north at our cottage during the summer, an adult gives one of the kids change to walk across the street to the “little store” to purchase a Sunday paper for everyone’s reading!!Since neither Paula nor Melissa buys the News or Free Press during the Express days when they’re dropped off at stores around town, I checked in at the BP gas station on the way out of town Saturday morning.
Just after 9 a.m., there remained a healthy stack of both papers. As I shelled out my buck for the Free Press, I asked the clerk if the price hike had depressed sales.
“Big time,” he said, noting that he typically sold all 20 copies of his Free Press allotment at 50 cents but is sending back 12 or 13 copies of the papers priced at $1. (Overall, the papers say single-copy sales were down 28 percent in the first week after the increase.)
A couple of hours later, at a truck stop just east of Battle Creek, the Free Press was sold out and I bought the last copy of the Detroit News.
“We sell out every day,” the clerk told me, “but they only send us two copies of each.”
Alas, since advertisers value that sort of remote circulation far less than papers sold in the metro area, the papers have little incentive to satisfy such demand.
Paging through the papers on Express days last week, one of the many advertising challenges became clear: Funeral homes post only about half as many paid death notices on days when the papers are not delivered to homes.
Maybe a revamped ad strategy could start with the funeral directors: What could the papers do to serve this traditional advertising niche? Short of getting people to delay their demise to match delivery days, of course.
