Michele K. Jones, a journalism PhD student at UNC-Chapel Hill, had some good thoughts on how local newspapers should change their practices to better serve their communities and return to financial stability. You can see my thoughts on some of her points here (scroll down to the part where the list starts and mouse over the highlights).

I want to look at one of the items on her list in more detail. It is something I’ve been thinking about for a while:

Print a newspaper as often as is financially reasonable. If that means only once a week or three times a week, fine.

I think weaning itself off the daily publishing schedule is in many ways the first domino for a newspaper in its evolution into a news company for the 21st century. In a lot of ways, that daily printing cycle is like the Sword of Damocles, dangling over every newspaper journalist’s head. The removal of the need to produce a print product every 24 hours no matter what will unshackle a news company and its journalists, and other innovations would almost naturally follow as the hurdles that stand in their way will start to fall with the removal of the daily deadline. Of course, it should be noted that simply printing on fewer days won’t solve newspapers’ problems. It’s the first step from point A and it removes some of the hurdles on your way to point B. You still need to take the other steps.

If a news company doesn’t have to print a paper product every 24 hours …

• … it will no longer need to give readers yesterday’s news today. That whole practice is a result of the time it takes to print and deliver a newspaper. The Web and dissemination to mobile devices will become the primary modes of publishing, which means the stories will be much more timely.
• … it will be able to cut down on the amount of national and international wire copy it runs. If you only print once or twice a week, chances are you’ll have much more staff-generated, local copy for those issues than you would if you printed every day. What national and international stories you do run will be selected for its value and relevance to your readers (and preferably localized to varying degrees by your staff). Therefore, you will run wire copy for the sake of their value to your readers, not for the sake of filling space.
• … it will be able to deliver more thoughtful, in-depth journalism than the daily cycle allows. Without the need to write 15 inches of copy to fill a hole in a print product at the end of each day, reporters would be able to pursue a story the way it ought to be. They don’t need to publish something just because the publishing schedule demands it. They will be able work a story properly — doing in-depth research and investigation rather than just regurgitating soundbites from experts or playing “he said, she said”. This will add value to the work, which is especially important as more and more papers are considering switching to paid-content models.
• … it will be able to do more open-process journalism. On the flip side of the previous bullet point, when breaking news occurs or when other suitable situations arise, journalists will be more able to present the news as an evolving entity. Given the air of finality associated with something appearing in print, as well as the lag time between print editions, open-process journalism just doesn’t work as well on paper as it does online, where the audience expects the reports to evolve and stories can be updated in a matter of seconds. Unshackled from the need to have a story for the next day’s print edition, a reporter can present the story in the most suitable way online without having to worry about “saving something for the paper”. It doesn’t mean adopting a “get it fast over getting it right” mentality. It just means you don’t need to be holding on to accurate information for hours before it reaches your audience, and you don’t have to worry about what you do online devaluing or “scooping” your print product.
• … it will be able to do more commercial printing. Hey, you have a printing press, so why let it just sit there on the days you’re not printing your own paper? Print other people’s paper. Print magazines. Heck, print stationery. With the reduction in frequency of its own print product, a news company can take on more commercial printing, giving it another revenue stream. When it comes time to upgrade the press, it may even want to get equipment more suited for other commercial printing and just adapt its own print product to that press rather than getting a press that’s good for printing a newspaper but limits what other types of printing it can do.
• … it might be able to outsource its printing if that makes more financial sense. Once the press is sold, you would no longer need a building in which to house it, which means you can move into a much smaller and cheaper office space with just enough room for staff and computers. This would also be the first step toward de-centralizing your operations and letting various staff work off-site, which makes more sense for reporters anyway and would further reduce your need for office space.
• … it will have no choice but to focus on the Web first. It is hard to make the Web the top priority as long as you have a daily print deadline looming over your head. Removing that urgency will signal clearly to your staff that not only are you preaching “Web first”, you are actually taking steps to make it so. Now that the Web is clearly your primary product, they will have no choice but to start paying more attention to it.
• … it will be freed from the traditional reader expectations that often handcuff a newspaper in how drastically it reinvents itself. It’s one thing to say, “Don’t run baseball box scores anymore.” It’s quite another to stick to that when you get a barrage of phone calls from readers complaining about it the first day you cut out the box scores. As long as a newspaper keeps a daily print product and keeps slimming it down, it will be seen by readers as delivering less and less. Drastically changing the print schedule, however, will be more likely to be perceived as part of a total reinvention (assuming you are rolling out other parts of that reinvention as well) than a slow death spiral, which gives the news company more leeway in what it can take away without bringing a mountain of wrath upon its head. True, you risk losing readers, but you will also open yourself up to gaining new ones with your new identity.
• … it will be freed from the once self-imposed, now reader-imposed obligation to cover everything. If you’ve spent the last century being the newspaper of record for your town, then it’s only reasonable that your readers come to expect you to continue playing that role, even though the media landscape and changing financial conditions make it no longer feasible to do so. Cutting back on the frequency of your print product is a strong signal that you are reinventing your identity, so while you are at it, dump that “we cover everything” role. Instead, identify several core focuses and do them better than anyone else in your market. It may be that a community could use an entity that tries to cover everything, but from the perspective of the news company, it’s smarter to specialize.
• … it will have a lot more flexibility in reshuffling its staff and resources toward other parts of its operation to help implement innovations. If you don’t have to print every day, then you don’t have to have a minimum of X bodies in the office every night putting that print product together. That means being able to shift some of your desk staff’s duties away from editing filler copy to facilitating your Web site, or move more of your design staff to producing interactive content for the Web.
• … it will get leaner. Yes, this means cutting jobs, which I despise. However, one must face facts: Changes in the media landscape dictate that newspapers will have to get leaner no matter what course they take. Creating, printing, and delivering a daily newspaper really is, excuse the cliché, a minor daily miracle, and it takes a lot of manpower. The elimination of a daily print product will invariably mean that certain positions involved in that process will become unnecessary. The difference, however, is that these jobs will be cut because they’ve become unnecessary rather than what’s happening now — people being laid off even though their functions remain at the paper, thus heaping more work on those who are left.
• … it will be able to reinvent its print product and elevate it above its traditional “birdcage liner” status. If you are only printing once or twice a week, obviously the content of your print product will have to change dramatically, perhaps toward more analytical and investigative content. Complement that increase in the quality of content with an increase in the physical quality of your print product (better paper, more color), and you have a product that you might be able to charge more for. And sometimes appearance does matter, and a better looking product does imply a more valuable product.
• … it will be able to open a side business selling newspaper stock as birdcage liner and fishwrap. If you’ve accomplished the preceding bullet point, then your print product is too nice to be birdcage liner, and people still need to get that from somewhere, right?