Earlier this week the Cleveland Plain Dealer announced some significant changes in its operations.
The PD will still print a newspaper seven days a week and make it available at newsstands and other outlets, but home delivery will be limited to three days a week, one of which will be Sunday. A new, digitally focused company will be formed, and the content for the print edition will be used on the digital platform. If you subscribe for the three-day delivery deal, you will also receive access to a seven-day digital news website. In addition, reports say that about a third of the newspaper’s reporters, as well as members of management, will be laid off.
We’ll have to see how this works, but my guess is that a three-day home delivery schedule won’t last long. People who want to read a daily newspaper in paper form will want to do so every day. For them, it’s part of the daily routine, not something they choose to do only on, say, Sunday, Tuesday, and Friday. If their newspaper won’t deliver every day, my guess is that they won’t drive to the nearest convenience store to pick up a copy — they’ll either try to find a newspaper that does deliver every day or they will do without every day.
The layoff of a big chunk of the editorial staff also tells you something about electronic news sources. They just aren’t as robust in the news gathering, and crucial editing and fact-checking, functions as a printed daily newspaper will be. People who read news digitally don’t look at the entire content and say — as a daily newspaper subscriber will — that the size of the newspaper has really shrunk. The digital subscriber will go to the website for a few stories, but not the deep dive a daily reader often takes. The inevitable result is less content, and less coverage of the smaller stories that often are the most important.
The newspaper business is changing. Those who want to see what the future will bring would do well to keep their eye on the PD‘s big experiment.
The Nieman Journalism Lab looks to future trends in journalism. Last month, 
The reporter was a 30-year veteran who worked for The Cape Cod (Mass.) Times. She had covered the police and courts beats tor the paper and was held in high regard by those she’d covered. However, she wrote an article about a Veterans’ Day parade that struck her editor as just a little too pat, yet unbelievable. When the editor tried to identified the people quoted in the article, she couldn’t. The newspaper, to its credit, then undertook a careful review of the reporter’s human interest feature stories, found other indications of non-existent sources, and reported the fact on its front page as part of an apology.
The PD has been hit by declining circulation. 
Rather than simply reaching conclusions about America, Brooks softens his views by addressing both the European and American democratic systems. Does anyone actually believe there are similarities between these “systems”? America has been a representative democracy for almost 250 years; Europe still had crowned heads leading it into a bloody war less than 100 years ago. The balkanized, multi-party, coalition-dependent parliamentary systems in most European countries bear little relation to our two-party system, where nearly every election has a clear winner and loser and a ruling majority results. Until recently, America had stoutly resisted the European socio-economic model, with its early retirement ages and short work weeks and months of paid vacation. And no one in their right mind would equate the European Union with our Congress. The ponderous bureaucrats of the EU will be there forever, impossible to root out; in America, in contrast, voters can easily — as the last three election cycles have shown — toss out incumbents and install new representatives who purportedly will better reflect their views.
Brooks recognizes this. Why, then, does he create a false equivalence between America and Europe? I think it’s because simply stating that America is on the wrong track, and our politicians have led us there, requires more guts than he possesses. He doesn’t want to unnecessarily upset any of the powerful inside-the-beltway types that he hobnobs with, so he writes something that makes it seem as though democracies, generally, are doomed to fail through the sheer force of greedy human nature. That conclusion makes the bitter pill a lot easier to swallow: it’s no one’s fault, really.
Of course, the Dispatch has every right to control its content and to decide whether, and if so where, to carry Doonesbury. As the Dispatch‘s editor points out, some newspapers carry Doonesbury on the op-ed page precisely because it frequently includes political content; the Dispatch has chosen not to do so. But Doonesbury is not the only comic strip that is addressing more adult themes. Bloom County did so, Funky Winkerbean has done so, and so has For Better or For Worse — among many others. The daily comics, like so many other aspects of our American culture, have become a lot more diverse, and a lot less predictable, over the past few decades. That change has occurred because many comics artists chafed at the artificial constraints that tradition imposed on comics strips, and wanted to write and draw about topics that were more relevant to their lives.
The Sun-Times concludes — accurately, in my view — that people don’t pay a lot of attention to newspaper endorsements anymore, that there are lots of other sources of information available to voters now, and that many people just view endorsements as a tangible sign of claimed bias. The newspaper will continue to publish news articles about the races, as well as the candidates’ responses to questionnaires and video of the newspaper’s interviews of the candidates.
