Cleveland Plain Dealer To Deliver Only Three Days A Week

Advance Publications is the Taliban of American journalism. The only difference is instead of desecrating Buddhas, the Newhouse family is destroying newspapers.

The latest casualty is the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Advance Publications announced on Friday that although the Plain Dealer will still be printed seven days a week, home delivery would only be available three of those days. It’s an improvement over what Advance Publications has done to some of its other properties like the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Harrisburg Patriot News and the Syracuse Post-Standard, where the entire paper is published three days a week but it’s a bad sign as the Newhouse family tries to slowly divest itself from the news business.

As Ryan Chittum describes in his feature for the Columbia Journalism Review on the Times-Picayune, this seems to be a concerted strategy to bleed as much profit as possible from the papers:

It’s hard to imagine a lucrative future for NOLA.com once the print edition inevitably slides into the red. But consider this: If they sold the paper right now, the Newhouses probably would get less than $40 million for it, based on the earnings multiples of recent newspaper sales. By radically slashing costs, as they have done—perhaps by as much as $25 million—the company can earn that amount in a couple of years thanks to higher profit margins. Anything beyond that is gravy.

This looks like an orderly liquidation. By cutting costs well ahead of perpetually declining revenues from the “Inkosaurus,” as James O’Byrne calls the print edition, the Newhouses can ride the Times-Picayune down profitably while minimizing the loss of money. Once the paper reaches terminal velocity, they can shut down Advance Central Services, the print wing, tie up any potential liabilities from the paper, and pitch them into the Mississippi.

If NOLA Media Group is able to turn a profit on its own by then, probably with a dramatically lower headcount than its newsroom has even now, so be it. But it will never amount to much as a business. Not to a family worth at least $14 billion. And not to serious readers, either, who likely will have long ago floated off the river of content. By then, a system that so clearly emphasizes quantity over quality will have taken its toll. And not just in New Orleans.

There’s still a real market for newspapers. After all, shrewd investors like Warren Buffett are still buying them and there still is ample readership for daily papers. Although newspapers will no longer be virtual mints, like they were in the pre-Craigslist era, the demand for good reporting on local news isn’t going away. The journalism industry will have to figure out how to adapt to this new age. It will take time as the market for online advertising matures and it will take money to weather the ongoing transition. The Newhouses seem uninterested in spending either.

Instead, by cutting home delivery, they seem to be daring readers to cancel their subscriptions and to launch the paper on a downward spiral that will have a devastating effect in northeast Ohio. But, then again, it’s still more profitable than just selling the paper to someone who might want to run it.

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