Advance makes its move on Cleveland

Plain Dealer to drop to three days a week delivery, though seven days a week on the newsstand. No word yet on how it will impact the staff.

http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2013/04/about_northeast_ohio_media_gro.html

 

Ann Arbor gets whacked to web-only. New Orleans and Bama go to 3-day publication. Cleveland will publish seven but deliver for three. Syracuse takes a shot. Portland and others await.

Does Advance have a damn plan at all or is it just throwing stuff against the wall?

 

Maybe Advance's plan is tailored to each market. More likely, they are trying a bunch of different plans to see what works best. Or they don't really have a clue.
I like option three.

 

Why do you piss off your loyal (subscription) customers by cutting their subscriptions, while appeasing the occasional reader with seven days of news? It makes no sense.

I also predict they're going to lose a lot of carriers who will find it's not worth the effort for three days of revenue instead of seven. It's not like they can get another job those other mornings.

 

So what's the solution? Just keep bleeding?

 

Oh, the bleeding's going to get worse.

 

And the question is what do the four non-delivery days look like in terms of content. Do they get whacked to such a small size it's not worth it?

 

I think they've already negotiated the staff cuts with the union. The only question now is who and when?

 

I imagine the cost of delivery is pretty high -- number of papers printed, cost of deliverypeople, gasoline, etc. But, yes, this does sound odd.

 

Wrote a piece on the Syracuse move for Poynter.

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/201776/inside-advances-post-standard-newspaper-as-it-transforms-this-week-to-digital-first/

 

Because those loyal customers are not paying the bills. Their subscription payments, as high as they might be, don't come anywhere close to covering the cost of 7/365 production, printing and delivery of a newspaper.

Subscribers had their paper habit paid for, by advertisers, until 2006. <a href="http://cdn.economistgroup.com/leanback/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/SoberTrend.jpeg">The print advertisers have stopped doing that</a>, and digital advertisers haven't replaced them, yet. Someone has to cover the cost of printing and delivering a paper. What advertisers are left in the paper will help offset the cost to subscribers, but not nearly as much as they used to.

PD subscribers will complain that their subscription price should be reduced if they get fewer papers per week. They're wrong. Their price should go up. Home-delivered print is a luxury product, even at only 3 days a week.

Starbucks will quit selling you coffee if it loses money on each cup. Or it will reduce the size of the cup. Or raise the price of the cup. Or (like newspapers) find someone else to help pay for the cup. Or sell you other stuff to make up for the loss. Or some of all of the above. But what it won't do is keep selling you coffee the way it always did if it loses money in the deal -- no matter how loyal you might have been.

Most newspapers remain profitable, and we all know how they've done that. But <a href="http://stateofthemedia.org/2013/newspapers-stabilizing-but-still-threatened/2-print-ad-revenue-continues-to-decline-copy/">print advertising revenue continues to drop</a>. Want to keep printing 7 days a week? Find a bunch of new advertising clients, stat. Or jack the price of a subscription.

It's hard to remain in business without happy, loyal customers. Cutting back print frequency is sure to make them unhappy. But somehow, those customers need to wake up to the fact that the newspaper they want is very expensive to make, and someone has to pay the bill.

 

I think Newark may be next.