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Most of the grim news you hear in the newspaper market revolves around major metro newspapers. Falling print circulation and their transformation from a print-only to an online world. The ensuing scramble to replace lost print revenue with online revenue.

But the battle for diversity is not just taking place online with the major mastheads. Newspapers of all types and sizes are also looking to other print opportunities and online efforts to diversify their footprint in the community.

Michigan has become an epicenter for this battle. In Detroit, the two major daily broadsheets have moved from daily home delivery to a three-day delivery schedule. The Detroit Free Press and Detroit News are concentrating most of their efforts online.

As the home of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor is a very wired community and includes one of the most highly educated readership bases in the country. The Ann Arbor News has been published daily for 170 years, but recently, they announced the closing of the newspaper. The Ann Arbor News will resurface as AnnArbor.com this summer, with a twice-weekly print publication supplementing their online efforts.

See: http://freep.com/transform
See: http://annarbor.com

In a quest for diversity, the newspapers have created other publications and Web sites too:

Detroit’s local newspapers also publish:
StyleLine Magazine: http://www.stylelinemag.com
MotorCity Moms: www.Motorcitymoms.com
MetroMix Detroit: http://detroit.metromix.com
Signature Magazine: http://www.signaturemag.com

With multiple titles and varied destinations, older, traditional print publishing solutions are showing their age.

The transformation taking place in the newspaper market is creating a lot of opportunities for WoodWing to help publishers make the leap into this brave (and sometimes scary) new world. Publishers are looking for content management systems to help control content and drive it to various destinations. More and more are looking to WoodWing to help position them for the future.

The old saying is that with challenges come opportunities. That's never been more true than it is today in the newspaper industry. Publishers have discovered that the old way of doing business doesn't work.

The news today is grim, but the future doesn't have to be. At WoodWing, the future that we see is full of opportunity.