Long live journalism?

The Detroit Media Partnership, which publishes the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News, announced big changes are coming in how it publishes. Next spring, the newspapers will deliver print editions to homes only on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays, their biggest advertising days. They will still print daily, but the remaining days of the week, the size of the print edition will be drastically reduced and will only be available at newsstands. The papers will push online delivery of the news over print.

I can't say that I'm shocked to see this coming, but it makes me pretty sad. However, I think it could well be the most workable business model for newspapers to come along. It certainly makes more sense than cutting your staffs to nothing and cutting budgets so that the reporters and photographers who remain can barely leave the building to cover the news.

Fact is, this writing has been on the wall for a long time; newspapers just refused to believe it. Or maybe averted their eyes. Yes, there is still an audience for print — and I think to some extent there always will be — but it is literally dying. I think that those who are in the early 20s and teens now are likely going to be the last generation to see print newspapers have much of a role in society. There will always be those small-town or neighborhood weeklies and specialty publications, I think, but the bigger papers (even ones like the small daily I work for) have to face that in order to survive, they've got to emphasize online. Home delivery of a print newspaper will, for them, become something "extra," an offering to those who can afford the luxury of sitting at home in their pjs reading the paper while the rest of us rush around with a job or two, or kids to rush to school, or whatever we do to get by while we hear the news on radio or browse on PDAs or cell phones or whatever we'll have in the future.

Our product has never been a piece of paper. It has been delivery of information, wether it be in advertising, articles or opinion. That can be done in many different media. Few papers took broadcasting seriously as competition, fewer still looked at the Internet that way. A very few did, and even embraced that competition. What the Freep is doing is quite likely the next step we have to take to keep delivering our true product.