Tag Archives: Tribune

Not the Right Mix For Gannett

By Mark Hanzlik, Executive Director

Metromix weekly print publications have been quietly disappearing across the country for the past few years while their online counterparts continued to grow and attract market share.    On September 19, the Cincinnati Enquirer will shut down Metromix, marking possibly one of the last Metromix print publications in the Gannett publishing chain.  I said “possibly” because no one is really keeping track anymore.

Gannett began publishing entertainment weekly tabloids (distributed separately from their daily product) in 2003, Cincinnati’s weekly CiN Weekly which was the first one, may also have been the model for what later became a more widely published product called Metromix.   At one point, Gannett and Tribune Company were both launching these free weeklies and dailies at a rate that would make people think the newspaper industry was far from declining.  Gannett and Tribune Co. eventually forged an agreement for a joint effort with Metromix online.   Read more about the Cincinnati free weekly battle in a post this past week by CityBeat titled “R.I.P. Metromix” which was also posted on the AAN web site.

gannett

As for newspapers in general, it’s not been a good year already.  Hearing about free entertainment print publications being cashed in by their owners just adds more definition to the story.  But on the other hand, if the reader demand was great enough for these products in the first place and they weren’t simply daily newspaper “products” we might see some of them remain on the racks for few more years.