New Orleans paper to limit printing to 3 days a week

Many daily newspapers have been moving away from paper for years, emphasizing digital news. Lately, some print dailies have been moving away from publishing daily, too.

To try to combat the industry’s decline in readership, advertising and profits, a handful of newspapers are now cutting back their publishing schedules from seven days a week in print to just three.

The latest: The storied New Orleans Times-picayune, one of America’s oldest papers, which announced Thursday that it plans to limit its print schedule beginning this fall to Wednesday, Friday and Sunday editions. It will maintain 24/7 online reporting via its site, Nola.com.

This is a tactical trend for New York- based Advance Publications, which owns the Times-picayune, as it pushes toward a limited print-digital model. Advance said Thursday that in addition to the Times- Picayune, it will also cut back the print frequency of its three papers in Birmingham, Mobile and Huntsville, Ala., to three days.

Even as print declines in the digital age, it’s still the economic oxygen of newspapers. Print ads account for more than 86 percent of the $24 billion that the industry collected last year, according to the Newspaper Association of America, and the nation’s 1,400 or so daily newspapers have about 45 million paying customers who get their news the old- fashioned, carbonbased way.

Yet print revenues are falling so rapidly that the industry is roughly half the size it was as recently as 2007. And producing a printed paper also carries significant costs, including expensive presses, warehouses full of newsprint, fleets of delivery trucks and a manufacturing process that hasn’t changed significantly in decades.

Thus, the industry’s existential problem: How to cross the chasm that separates the declining (but relatively high revenue) print business to the lower-cost (but far lower revenue) digital news business?

Advance Publications, which is owned by the billionaire Newhouse family, has been the most aggressive in the industry in answering that question.

In 2009, the company cut its Ann Arbor News in Michigan to two print editions weekly. In February, it moved seven more of its dailies in Michigan to a threetimes-per-week print schedule.