Is the end of home delivery near?

MSNBC and ABC takes a look (and here) at the Detroit newspapers' decision to cut back home delivery to three days a week, and quotes experts predicting that home delivery might be gone in the near future. As someone who has subscribed to home delivery since leaving my boyhood home, it's a hard concept to grasp. But, you know, it makes more sense than just waiting until your costs overwhelm your company. Picking up individual papers on the other four days of the week isn't all that hard, although I'd suspect advertising would really drop off then.

I would predict that home delivery will continue for smaller community newspapers. But, for metro papers, I'm not so sure. Nevertheless, I look for growth in "total market coverage" products as some advertisers realize that their appeal doesn't fit into the narrower and narrower niches that media is targeting. I think of this every time I try to look something up in the Yellow Pages. Once, it was simple to find numbers and addressed. Today an advertiser has to buy niche ads in several areas. For example, a restaurant might have a listing under "restaurants," another under "ethnic restaurants," another under "cuisines," another under "Neighborhood restaurants," and who knows what other areas?

I remember how nice it was to take the Sunday newspaper's listing of open houses (generally the back page of the Sunday classified section), mark the ones I was interested in no matter the realtor (deliberate lower case of this ostentatious word), and drive around to visit them. Today, one has to go to each website, try to figure out where your interest is, then print out a guide. Then go to another company's site and repeat the process. Of course, I'm going to be told there is an aggregator out there somewhere, but I sure don't know where it is.