Dec 13, 2008 09:52 AM
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New York, 1:41 PM
Tue Feb 9
56 posts in the last 24 hours
Nobody lives in Detroit any more, and nobody reads print newspapers, so maybe it's not so bad that the few remaining Detroit residents can no longer get their awful papers delivered to their burned-out homes.
Detroit is a two-paper town, and I don't care what the reasons are for that, but they're very bad reasons. Nevertheless, the company that owns both papers is going to make them much worse, and not deliver them most days! A winning business plan if I ever heard one:
"The papers will deliver to subscribers only on the most profitable days of the week — Sunday, and either Thursday or Friday or both, said these people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the changes and the decisions were not final. On other days, they will still print slimmer single-copy editions. The changes will be accompanied by staff cuts, these people said."
As you can imagine, being a newspaper in Detroit during the implosion of the American auto industry is possibly one of the shittiest business propositions possible. This is the biggest step towards an online-only future that any major American paper has made since the Christian Science Monitor announced its plans to go totally digital. So perhaps, who knows, it might work? More likely it's a step towards bankruptcy, followed by the inexorable collapse of Detroit into an I Am Legend-style monster-infested ghost town.
But it might work. [NYT, WSJ; pic: Freep]
Send an email to Hamilton Nolan, the author of this post, at Hamilton@gawker.com.
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