Brothers plan new newspaper to fill void left by cutbacks in Detroit
As established newspapers cut services or in some cases shut down, can new papers move in to fill a void?
Two veteran publishers say they’ll launch a new paper to meet the needs of readers disappointed when Detroit’s existing papers cut back on home delivery.
According to the Associated Press:
Mark Stern, 63, and brother Gary Stern, 67, said they hope to publish within 60 days the first issue of a newspaper serving the Detroit area. The Detroit Daily Press is expected to sell for 50 cents daily and $1 on Sundays.
They said they were working to secure contracts with two printing plants and lease office space and were looking to hire department heads for the privately funded newspaper.
Mark Stern said the Detroit Daily Press should appeal to older readers who prefer a print copy of the paper, and its primary niche will be those who want their paper home-delivered. The newspaper also will have a web site with a brief summary of the news for nonsubscribers.
“There is a definite need here,” Mark Stern said at a news conference in the Detroit suburb of Southfield. “People are used to having a newspaper in their hand. … That’s what we’re going to do — provide a newspaper.”
The Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News launched their plan March 30 to reduce home delivery to Thursday, Friday and Sunday for the Free Press and to Thursday and Friday for the News, and began also offering an electronic edition. Each paper also prints papers on the non-home-delivery days and sells them at retail outlets.
The Sterns said they can avoid the financial problems of the existing Detroit dailies because they won’t have overhead costs such as delivery trucks, pension funds or facilities. Advertising and editorial employees will work for the newspaper, but not distributors or press operators.
Can the Sterns succeed?
The AP quotes media analyst Ken Doctor of Outsell Inc. as saying the Detroit Daily Press has “a large hill to climb” but barriers to entering the market are low.
“As these big, former monopoly newspapers winnow down, they’re leaving a hole in the marketplace and entrepreneurs are trying to figure out how to exploit that hole,” Doctor said. “The test is, are there (at least) 150,000 households who say, ‘I just want to hold a newspaper in my hands seven days a week?’
“It’s a fascinating test. How well they’ll execute, … that’s a whole other question.”
Steve Parker is the deputy managing editor for news, and oversees the Post-Dispatch's front page. STLtoday's online news editors are on his newsroom team. Parker has been at the paper since September 1980. 
Good for these guys; more responses like this are needed, since there’s still one or two generations of readers who have been conditioned to a paper newspaper. However, could these two name the new paper anything more boring than the Detroit Daily Press? It reminds me of when the St. Louis Sun was unveiled. The first metropolitan daily started since World War II (at that time) and the name that was settled on was the St. Louis Sun! Come on, where’s the creativeness? Why not call it the Detroit Phoenix? It would be most appropriate. Sorry, but I’m fond of newspaper names like the Sacramento Bee, The Virginian-Pilot, The Times-Picayune.
The Sterns put out a pretty respectable strike paper in St. Louis back in the late 1970s. I think they might have a successful run in Detroit.