What Print Cuts at Times-Picayune Mean for Papers

The New Orleans Times-Picayune is stopping the presses for good on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays this fall. The risk is that taking four days off the table could further accelerate readers' shift away from print -- even on the days that advertisers still want it. When advertisers buy print, they pay higher ad rates than they would for the web.

That's partly why The Times-Picayune collected $64.7 million in print ad revenue last year but only $5.7 million on its website, according to Kantar Media estimates. But print is only as compelling as its audience. So a lot ultimately will ride on how The Times-Picayune -- like its three Advance siblings in Alabama that are also cutting print to three days a week -- deploys its savings. New Orleans' broader interest in capable, robust news coverage is also at stake. Advance Publications disputes the idea that cutting four costly days of print will do anything but help the business and the newsroom. "For people to equate not delivering a print publication seven days a week with somehow lessening our commitment to trusted, credible content is flat-out wrong," said Randy Siegel, president for local digital strategy at Advance Publications. "This is about doing more journalism on more platforms," he added, "not clinging to this rigorous orthodoxy that the only way to serve a community is to print a newspaper seven days a week." Expect others to follow. The Times-Picayune and the Alabama papers are actually only following the lead of papers in Detroit and elsewhere in Michigan. "It's not at all surprising that Detroit and New Orleans are in the vanguard of this, because those markets have had some fairly catastrophic problems," Mr. Mutter said. "You'll see this happen in markets that are economically less robust, where publishers don't want to fight the headwinds of print and want to just get ahead of the migration to digital."