Long-haul newspaper routes
On network TV prime time, three-hour highway trips, and what newspapers really ought to do about their print runs
The Quad City Times of Davenport, Iowa, will cease printing at its local press on September 30th and outsource printing to a sister publication under Lee Enterprises: The Times of Northwest Indiana.
■ In good weather, it's a 3-hour drive down Interstate 80 from Munster, Indiana, to Davenport, Iowa. It's not the first printing-press consolidation undertaken by Lee, nor is it the only long-haul newspaper delivery route: The Kansas City Star, for instance, is printed in Des Moines.
■ It is unclear what point remains to printing a daily newspaper that starts the morning already older than a gas station tuna salad sandwich. The Des Moines production site prints 15 different newspapers. No matter how ably a production manager is able to mass-produce those various editions, there's no way to get them all printed unless at least some of them have deadlines that land sometime before network TV prime time. That has obvious detrimental effects for the timeliness of the news being reported.
■ In parts of the Des Moines area, the Register is delivered by carriers during a window between midnight and 1:00 am, only for the papers to sit on front steps until sunrise, containing nothing fresher than what appeared on the 10:00 pm local news the night before.
■ If dedicated local printing is no longer an economic possibility, then there's really only one playbook that makes any sense for most newspapers in America: (1.) Go all-digital for the daily "edition". (2.) Publish a bunch of high-value, narrowly-targeted electronic newsletters (not Axios-style morning bullet lists, but real original reporting conveyed in high-quality writing). (3.) Finally, publish just one really well-thought-out weekly print edition, full of high-quality photography and journalism that's deserving of a quality typographic layout. There are still plenty of stories that are much better told on an attractive printed page than on any smartphone app, but probably not enough to justify killing a bunch of trees seven days a week.
