By Joel Thurtell
Obituary time at the Detroit Free Press: That venerable promotional creature, the furry, goofy Yak, is dead.
Word from inside the Freep is that this popular creature — an educational feature aimed at kids, part of it contained in the comics — and the award-winning reporting that were part of the Yak persona  have been scrapped to cut costs as the paper seeks to cut its workforce by 150.
The Yak joins other main features of the paper like the Sunday Twist women’s magazine and the suburban Sunday editions known as the Community Free Press on the scrap heap.
I also hear advertisers are not happy to learn that their promos are being switched from Twist to the main Sunday paper at higher rates.
How ’bout a little Bait and Twist?
Meanwhile, I also hear Freep ad reps are angry because the customers they’ve been cultivating for several years are losing their forum in the local CFP Sunday sections and will be lumped into some form of faux journalistic product the Free Press honchos are calling “advertorial boilerplate.” It’s to be a throwaway with “news” that’s not focused on any community. The newspaper counterpart to junk mail.
While I was still a reporter with the CFP, I sat in a meeting last year with a top ad exec from Gannett’s Detroit Media Partnership who sketched out a pretty dire picture of what it was like to sell Free Press ads. He used the word “churn” to describe how hard it was to sell small businesses an ad for more than a week.
Despite all the doom-and-gloom talk about dwindling ads, the local CFPs still have advertisers. But staffers were told the CFPs are “underwater,” meaning they’re losing money. So those advertisers — many of them small, local enterprises — now will have their ads placed in a shopperlike slick.
Advertorial boilerplate? Bye-bye, advertisers. Reminds me of the hash Gannett and Knight-Ridder made of the Joint Operating Agreement, aka newspaper monopoly, back in 1989. Advertisers got steamed then too, when they found their rates were being jacked up.
Everything that identified the Free Press as a unique publication now is being scrapped.
Now the Free Press is not unique. The New York Times has cut staff, the San Francisco Chronicle is losing $1 million a day, and that gothic monument on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile is for sale to raise cash for the cash-starved Chicago Tribune.
But here in Detroit, with the auto companies in what looks like free fall, newspaper advertising is dwindling fast.
Scariest of all is the notion that emerged from a recent staff meeting that Free Press brass have no idea what they’re doing. They are searching for a plan, but don’t have one. Editor Paul Anger reportedly told staffers, “We need a new business model. We need a new approach to presenting information.”
Counting the 110 buyouts of last fall and the 150 Gannett is looking for now, the compound reduction amounts to roughly 13 percent off the 2007 staff level.
They will be shedding workers with no plan for the future.
Well, that’s not quite true.
“Web first,” Anger told staffers. “We’re going to keep adding to the Web staff.”
Last I heard, nationwide, newspapers were getting 95 percent of their revenue from print ads and 5 percent from Web ads.
They need to figure how to make money from the Web.
It’s like tearing down your house to live in a cardboard shack.
Contact me at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
