Detroit Free Press to limit home delivery to 3 days

Detroit Free Press

DETROIT — The Detroit Free Press announced Tuesday a first-of-its-kind plan in the struggling U.S. newspaper industry — emphasizing more online delivery of news and information and cutting back home delivery days.

Detroit Media Partnership CEO Dave Hunke, publisher of the Free Press, said that starting in spring 2009, both the Free Press and the Detroit News — also operated by the partnership — would deliver to homes only on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays, the heaviest days for advertising and the most popular papers for readers. But the newspapers will remain available seven days a week at stores, newsstands and coin boxes across Michigan.

Hunke said the moves would allow both papers to maintain their news-gathering forces, shift resources to their Web sites, develop new ways to deliver information digitally, enhance multimedia offerings — and, for the foreseeable future, keep Detroit one of the nation’s few remaining two-newspaper towns.

The strategy contrasts with significant across-the-board cuts, including sharp newsroom reductions and outsourcing of jobs, at many newspapers struggling to maintain traditional delivery.

“There is a day of reckoning coming for newspapers, which in my mind don’t change and change rapidly,” Hunke said in an interview before Tuesday’s announcement. “That is a way of life that is going to disappear [for some newspapers] as early as this coming year.”

He said the changes would lead to a reduction of about 9 percent of the Detroit Media Partnership work force, now around 2,100 people. The partnership publishes, distributes and sells advertising for both the Free Press and News under their 19-year-old Joint Operating Agreement, but the newspapers have independent news staffs.

There will be no job reductions in the newsrooms of either paper as part of the new publishing plan.

Hunke said the strategy was driven less by declining advertising revenue and circulation in a dour Michigan economy than by soaring costs for newsprint, ink and fuel.