Business took a turn for the worse over the last decade for newspaper distributor Nick Genova, but home delivery remained a rock.
Genova’s company, Washtenaw News, distributes fifteen publications locally, including the Detroit Free Press, New York Times, and most recently the Michigan Daily. After “dropping for ten years,” he says, newsstand sales “started to level off last summer.”
Genova says the free fall was entirely in so-called street sales–deliveries to retail outlets and vending machines. “Home delivery for us has been as good as ever and even rose to a number that’s pretty good right now,” he says. “The street sale is so low it can’t go much lower, but it’s stable. I don’t have the exact percentage, but we have way more home delivery than street sales. It used to be the opposite.”
Home-delivery numbers are holding up across the board, Genova says. He has no great insight into why, except to observe that promotional efforts by the Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today “seem to be working.
“There’s still the reader that wants it to look at [a newspaper] at breakfast,” he says. “And we’re thankful for that.”
