Detroit’s Daily Papers Are Now Not So Daily (Published 2009)

DETROIT — Maybe once a year, a city has a news day as heavy as the one that just hit Detroit: The White House forced out the chairman of General Motors, word leaked that the administration wanted Chrysler to hitch its fortunes to Fiat, and Michigan State University’s men’s basketball team reached the Final Four, which will be held in Detroit.

All of this news would have landed on hundreds of thousands of Motor City doorsteps and driveways on Monday morning, in the form of The Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News.

Would have, that is, except that Monday — of all days — was the long-planned first day of the newspapers’ new strategy for surviving the economic crisis by ending home delivery on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. Instead, on those days, they are directing readers to their Web sites and offering a truncated print version at stores, newsstands and street boxes.

“This morning, I felt like something was missing,” said Nancy Nester, 51, a program coordinator at a traumatic brain injury center who is from West Bloomfield and has subscribed to both papers for four years. “There was this feeling of emptiness.”

She did not even bother to pick up the condensed print versions that were offered free on Monday. “I don’t have time to stop at the store,” she said. “That’s why I have home delivery.”

To Carol Banas, a retired city planner and longtime Free Press reader, the idea of not having a printed paper is unimaginable. “I’m at the age where I like my newspapers in hand,” said Ms. Banas, 56, who read a hard copy of Monday’s abbreviated Free Press in an Einstein Brothers Bagels shop in Royal Oak. “I know that’s English online, but it’s not the same.”

On Monday, The News and The Free Press, which share business functions under a joint operating agreement, distributed more than half a million free copies of their condensed print editions, but they will begin charging (50 cents, as always) on Tuesday. The Free Press, the larger of the papers, will still make home deliveries on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays, and The News, which does not have a Sunday issue, will deliver on Thursdays and Fridays.

They have been heavily promoting not just their Web sites, but also online “e-editions” that look just like the printed papers. The e-editions have been open to everyone, but executives say that soon, only paying customers will be able to see them. For a day, at least, there was no doubt about the demand: the computers delivering the e-editions could not keep up on Monday morning, and many people were unable to load them.

“We had an overwhelming — literally overwhelming — number of people trying to get onto the e-edition site this morning, and it’s gratifying on one hand, but it slowed things down,” said Jonathan Wolman, editor and publisher of The News, which is owned by MediaNews Group.

The papers went to great effort to prepare readers, printing warnings and guides to the new format, but not everyone got the message. “A lot of people were prepped for it, and yet we’ve also been hearing from folks who were surprised that today was the day,” Mr. Wolman said.

With profits shrinking fast, newspapers are grasping for the formula that will ensure survival, and a few have decided to save on printing and distribution by publishing only on the most profitable days of the week — potentially a step toward an all-digital future. The Detroit papers are not going quite that far, but clearly the impetus is the same. Executives have called it a calculated gamble, but they say that Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays account for more than 80 percent of their advertising revenue.

About 50,000 people tried to click on the e-editions Monday, five times as many as usual, said David Hunke, chief executive of the Detroit Media Partnership. And squeezing all of the day’s news into a 32-page print edition “certainly tested our theories on design and editing.”

In a speech to the Detroit Economic Club on Monday, Mr. Hunke presented a strategy for winning readers electronically. The papers will soon be available on Amazon’s Kindle reader and, possibly by early next year, on another device from a company called Plastic Logic, said Mr. Hunke, who is also the publisher of The Free Press, which is owned by the Gannett Company.

Despite the added demand and confusion, it probably worked to the papers’ benefit that the new strategy began with a crush of news, said Bob Giles, who held Mr. Wolman’s posts in the 1990s and is now curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. “It reminds people how valuable their newspapers are, even if it’s online,” he said.

The future no doubt lies in that direction, but for now, it is a tough sell for some readers of a certain age.

Howard Waxer, 60, dropped his longtime Free Press subscription in anticipation of losing seven-day delivery and said he would not read online. He leafed through The Free Press while eating a club sandwich at Country Oven Family Dining restaurant in Berkley and said this would be his approach from now on — pick up a copy and read it over lunch.

“There’s always going to be this,” he said, holding up the paper. “I can’t picture this city without a paper coming out.”