Seven-day newspapers aren’t just talking about cutting out one or two days a week in print — they’re talking five or six. Is this the only way to accelerate the transition to digital or speeding their own decline?
Ken Doctor reports in NiemanLab
What do you call a daily newspaper that’s no longer a daily newspaper? “Sunday + Digital” sounds far less poetic.
That’s now more than an academic question. Many publishers — if not most — are now seriously modeling and planning for the transformation of their businesses from seven-day newspapers to something…less, numerous industry sources tell me. And not just a little less — significantly less.
Blame Google and Facebook, blame tariffs and newsprint costs, blame Amazon and Uber for hiring away would-be early-morning newspaper deliverers — it makes little difference. We are on the brink of seeing major cutbacks in daily delivery and daily printing of newspapers, as soon as 2020.
“It is one of the top topics of discussion in the boardroom,” says Peter Doucette, managing director of the Technology & Media Practice for well-used news industry consultant FTI. “The current operating model is under duress like we’ve never seen before. Our point of view is that the daily morning distribution model is no longer going to work in a three- to five-year timeline. That’s broad, of course, and dependent on market.”
“Publishers have been focusing on growing net new digital subscribers” — see Nieman Lab director Joshua Benton’s piece on the difficulty doing so at the L.A. Times — “but they need to think of the transformation event — cutting distribution days — and the effect of moving print subscribers to digital subscribers.”
In essence, Doucette — who joinedFTI a year ago after leaving a high-profile role as chief consumer revenue officer for The Boston Globe’s industry-leading digital subscription initiative — is urging publishers to think bigger. That’s the drama playing out in almost every city large and small: timing that inevitable “transformation event” when the seven-day daily moves into a museum somewhere.
What can publishers — under great financial pressure to make shorter-term decisions — do to make this dramatic move from print to digital something more just the next stage of decline for the business?
While dozens of newspaper titles have cut Saturdays (creating a single weekend paper, something the Europeans have done for decades) or Mondays, this next cut would be far more impactful. The big question now on many corporate tables is whether the right number of days to kill is five or six.
There’s the 7/1 model. That’s basically the Sunday print paper — where most of the ad revenue is still generated — plus digital the rest of the week. Newspapers have been pushing “Sunday + Digital” offers to readers hitting paywalls for years now, and you’re going to see it a lot more — except often as the only home delivery option, not the skimpiest one.\
There’s the 7/2 model. That’s Sunday plus one weekday — maybe a food-heavy Wednesday stuffed with supermarket ads. (That’s a phenomenon that remains in some markets but has vanished in others.)
And, more conservatively, there’s 7/6. That’s what McClatchy piloted this spring at its South Carolina paper the Myrtle Beach Sun News, which I detail below. 7/6 saves a lot less in the physical costs — newsprint, printing, trucks, delivery — but it’s a way to take one step into the transformation process rather than jumping in all at once. And it’s a test: If you break the longstanding bond between the sun rising in the east and papers hitting doorsteps, will enough advertisers and subscribers accept it to make the economics work?
