It's been since the big newspaper strike of 1995 here in Detroit that the big city newspapers were welcomed in our home. When the strike hit, we ended our Detroit Free Press subscription and signed up with the Oakland Press. We stayed with the Oakland Press until moving out of Oakland County in 2001. Since then, there has been no newspaper delivered to our home. I have subscribed to the Oakland Press' e-paper option since that became available, but had resisted getting either the Free Press or Detroit News... until earlier this week.
There was a neighborhood kid selling subscriptions to the News this week as part of a fundraiser. With a 9-week paid subscription, you also received an Entertainment book - something which we didn't buy earlier in the year. So earlier this week, we became subscribers to the Detroit News.
The immediate upside is getting sale papers and coupons that you can't get reading the paper online. I also noticed pretty quickly how easy it is to miss stories when browsing just the online version. For me at least, scanning the entire paper is much quicker and more effective when using the paper version. Even though newspaper circulation continues to drop as more and more people read online, I wonder if that novelty might eventually wear off - or if we just need much bigger monitors. Maybe the next big thing will be using ultra large screen HDTV's to read the daily "paper".
Two other things that struck me these past couple of days... how much smaller in size the paper has become and how much the Detroit News is pumping its web site in the paper version. Even though the newspaper format might still be easier to read effectively, I do wonder if the Detroit News is positioning itself to move to an online-only version in the years to come. I'd guess yes, but not for at least 3 more years.
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