A modest proposal for Detroit

I propose that the Detroit Media Partnership try something really bold. Instead of having both the Free Press and the News cut back on home delivery, how about an experiment? Deliver the Free Press seven day a week, and discontinue free access to the web site. For the News, quit publishing altogether, and just focus on the web site. Okay, I know that couldn't really work because of their partnership agreement. But imagine if it could work.

Would the Free Press regain subscribers who didn't see why they should pay for a dead-tree edition when they could read the stories for free online? Would the News get rid of so much overhead that it would be able to survive as a lean, scrappy digital news source? Man didn't get to space and the moon before launching a couple test rockets. If only we could have two newspapers in one city willing to test radical new ideas. Which newspaper would be the next Laika, and which would (possibly) be Neil Armstrong?

In the long term, the Detroit model may make sense. Even if newspapers are able to get online revenues up to the current level of print revenues, print won't necessarily be dead. There's a reason thousands of people subscribe only to the Sunday paper. They like to sit outside and read the features. They like to clip coupons and flip through the circulars. They like to give their kids the comic page, while they read about the football games they didn't catch on TV yesterday. This is not likely to change. Perhaps there is room for dead trees in our digital future; perhaps Detroit is ahead of the curve, if only in this regard.