Where are those “cosmo” readers?

By Joel Thurtell

Back in 1991, I went to a meeting of Detroit Free Press editorial staff in that very impressive, wood-panelled room with the mural where imprtant meetings were held. This happened back when the Free Press still worked in its own Albert Kahn-designed building in downtown Detroit.

For a good hour, we listened to the paper’s higher-ups — principally our leader du jour, Heath Meriwether — urge us to write in a very different way.

So as to attract new readers, younger, more hip readers who supposedly had more money in their pockets, we were to devise news reports that would sparkle, enticing the most desired targets of the paper’s advertisers to buy the paper.

The problem with the Free Press, as seen by managers, was that we were aiming our prose at older, less hip and presumably less well-heeled readers. Our readers were stodgy, and so were we.

We were instructed to aim our writing in future at “sophisticated” readers, ones who were upscale and “cosmopolitan.”

No matter that these “older” and stodgier readers were the very ones who still were buying the paper. No matter that the young non-readers likely were getting their pocket change from their older, Free Press-subscribing parents. Or that they likely never would pay to read what we wrote, “sophisticated” or not.

“Cosmopolitan.” “Sophisticated.” These were pretty vague prescriptions. Pressed for a better definition, bosses told us we should make sure our stories would “resonate.”

Just before the meeting ended, veteran reporter John Castine raised his hand and asked the question that was on all our minds.

“You want us to write for the readers we don’t have,” Castine said. “What about the readers we DO have?”

I thought of Castine’s comment yesterday, Devember 17, 2008, as I read through the bombast (the Federal Reserve just dropped the prime lending rate to nothing — zero – and the Free Press toots its own horn all over page One) in that day’s Free Press lauding the paper’s “bold” new approach to serving its customers.

Theme: “Our effort for you won’t change.”

That seems true only if you ignore the fact that everything about the Detroit daily newspaper operation that hasn’t already changed is about to change radically. No more daily delivery. Wean readers from their daily-paper-over-coffee to staring at PDFs of the paper on a computer screen. And expect them to pay for it.

Readers the Detroit papers already have are slated to get the short end of the stick.

Don’t expect those print papers we see on Thursday, Friday and Sunday (Thursday and Friday only for the News) will be anything like today’s size.

They will be slimmed down versions of their present selves.

And their present selves are slimmed down versions of what the papers once were. Around 2005, the Detroit papers reduced the physical size of their product and ordered content cutbacks that seriously reduced the amount of actual writing the papers could present. I recall calculating the reduction totaled 35 percent.

I won’t even dwell on the loss of readership and quality occasioned by the Joint Operating Agreement in 1989 or the company-provoked strike in 1995.

I understand union leaders were told by managers on Tuesday, December 16, 2008 that the size and content of the print papers would be reduced. They also were told that advertisers feel the average age of subscribers — 51 — is too old. The readership is dying off and it’s not being replaced by younger readers.

How long before writers are urged, once again, to aim their stories at more “sophisticated” and “cosmopolitan” readers?

Trouble is, those cosmo folk either are reading the papers free online or simply ignore them.

The very readers the papers don’t want are the ones still buying the print newspapers.

How long before those readers the Detroit papers still have — the ones too old for their advertisers’ liking — say enough of this crap and stop their subscriptions?

Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com