A collective wail could be heard from many journalists across the country with the news a week or so ago that the storied Times-Picayune, the major daily newspaper serving New Orleans, plans to cut back its printed paper to three days a week while enhancing its web operation.
Nancy Barnes: We'll keep delivering daily in print, digitally
New Orleans paper cuts back on print. That's not going to happen here, thanks to you.
If Advance Publications carries through with its plans, New Orleans would become the first big city without a daily paper. To newspaper lovers, it seemed an abomination: What's an important city without a newspaper to capture the biggest news on its front page every day, to chronicle the success and failures of its sports teams, the drumbeat of daily life? Advance has similar plans for three newspapers in Alabama. In Canada, Postmedia Network also announced plans to cut back publication on certain days for some of its newspapers. (Detroit reduced home delivery on several days a few years ago, but it still prints a daily paper.)
All of this raises the question that has been posed to me a dozen times since that announcement: Is this inevitable for all newspapers? For the Star Tribune? The answer will be different for every market in America, but I can assure readers, unequivocally, that dropping print on any day of the week is not part of our master plan. It has never been discussed. Daily printed newspapers may well be with us for decades to come -- if that's what our readers want and are willing to pay for.
For many reasons, this is one of the best markets in the country for a news and information company, whether delivered in print or on the Web. One reason is the quality of our readers. They are educated, engaged, active participants in the community. They work hard to stay informed. And most of them still demand a printed paper along with a growing array of digital products that allow us to constantly update the news.
They have good company. Just last week, digital pioneer Michael Bloomberg (now mayor of New York) professed his love for printed newspapers and said he cannot do without them. He reads eight papers a day, and relies on editors to tell him the important news of the day. Warren Buffett recently invested in dozens of newspapers, declaring them a rich source of information for their local communities that is almost impossible to find elsewhere. Indeed, that has been my speech for years now.
At the same time, as our own Bob Dylan has been crooning for decades, change is inevitable. And just as the death of vinyl did not signal the end of music, neither would the death of print itself signal the end of journalism. Newsprint is a means of delivering information, an expensive platform culled from dead trees, printed in a big manufacturing plant and personally delivered to hundreds of thousands of doorsteps.
Only the U.S. Postal Service gives you that sort of personalized service, and it's going broke. Truth be told: some newspapers in weaker markets are, too. And so, it may make good business sense for them to cut some of those production costs and convert more daily readers to digital platforms. Executed well, this can preserve resources devoted to newsgathering.
At the Star Tribune, we are simply in a much better position and a much better market than Detroit or New Orleans. Our fundamental approach is to deliver readers their news and advertising when, where and how they want it. We now have customized delivery of news for the website, for iPads and iPhones, for the Droid marketplace, and for the original Kindle and the Nook. We have a replica of the printed paper that can be downloaded electronically for your computer or your iPad. Most recently, we finished developing an edition to be read on the Kindle Fire.
Many days now, I start reading the daily "paper" by downloading a version on my iPad before reading the print edition. (You don't even have to get out of bed to fetch it!) Yet, when I sit down at a coffee shop, I want the paper in my hands, and so do hordes of Star Tribune customers.
The death of print has been predicted since the birth of the Internet, just as the death of radio has been predicted since the birth of television. We will follow our own readers, just as we have followed them from their desktops to their phones. For now, Star Tribune readers are embracing these new digital platforms, but a large percentage want their traditional printed newspaper, too. So long as that remains true, our rich legacy of printing an old-fashioned, hard copy, ink-on-print newspaper every day of the week remains very much a part of our modern business.
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There are multiple reasons to dispute this debate assertion by JD Vance.