The future marches on for Detroit journalism.
Oh, man — talk about bad timing and the face-palm of missed opportunities. Just check out the devastating start to a story in the New York Times called “Detroit’s Daily Papers Are Now Not So Daily“:
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.
Read the story. There are people who will really miss the loss of a physical newspaper. But the Times does a good job of finding several different constituencies: there’s a woman who doesn’t have time to stop at the store for the new “abbreviated version,” as well as a retired woman who says she wants the physical product no matter what. And they also find a retired man who is ready to move online to find his news.
The papers’ servers crashed Monday, too, unable to keep up with huge demand for their “e-editions.” Maybe that bodes well?
Grant Hamilton
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Colin Corneau