I haven’t found a very budget-friendly answer for customers who get home delivery editions of The Detroit News and Free Press and soon will have limited service.

Reason: It’s obvious that those who want and able to read newspapers on line are already doing so – while those who are currently print readers are deliberately choosing the print edition for a variety of reasons.

We ran a subscriber survey for The Monroe Evening News earlier this year where the reader comments confirmed what we already suspected from daily contacts with customers: we have distinct audiences for the print and on-line formats. Furthermore, those of us who work in the newspaper business know – or should realize – that neither group is willing to budge in how it wants to receive its newspaper. That’s just how the market conditions are right now.

But where’s the money from that Internet audience?

Here’s an article from the Detroit News I wish to bring to your attention. It was posted yesterday in the aftermath of the Detroit newspaper announcement: Newspapers struggle nationwide.

A snippet:

“The riddle here, the big conundrum, is that newspapers have never had more readers than they have now,” said Lou Ureneck, an industry observer and chairman of Boston University’s journalism department. “If you combined the people reading news content on the Web with those still getting the paper, there’s never been more.”

But while readership is up, the main revenue stream that’s made big newsgathering operations possible for decades — print advertising — is evaporating. Internet-based advertising, while growing for newspaper companies across the nation, still doesn’t pay the bills for publishers; competition from larger companies that dominate the Web such as Yahoo and Google keep online advertising cheap.

And that’s why thousands of newspaper employees have been losing their jobs in recent weeks. Yes, I’ve been reading a journalism industry blog whose posts have included a roll call of how many people have been cut from what newspapers.

As the blog readers were asking questions from each other about how to file for unemployment and what to do with 401k funds, a couple of them also asked for tips on how to get by on reduced paychecks.

Rather than clutter the journalism blog with a lot of frugal lifestyle tips, I recommended Frugal Village and the Festival of Frugality as a start, and some keywords to use when hitting the search engines. When that post got a public thank-you, I followed up with a link to my blog and reminded the Detroit newspaper employees that I have a frugal blog in their neighborhood with a lot of Michigan links.

If you are someone in southeast Michigan who is out of work, or soon to be, check out my blog thread The Downsized Budget: How and Where to Cut Back.

Yes, I do have a lot of national readers. Those of you who live elsewhere are welcome to adapt whatever tips you can find applicable to your community, join in the conversation, link back and forth, etc.

However, Monroe on a Budget is aimed at a southeast Michigan audience. I go WAY beyond the general tips you find on many national blogs and give specific details for my local readers in Monroe County, Mich., as to who, what, when, where and how to apply that information. And a lot of those tips also apply to those in the Detroit and Ann Arbor areas.

Like I said to another group of people who lost their jobs a few months ago, what I’d really like is for all of you to have your jobs back.

But since I can’t help with the paychecks, I’ll help you out where I can.

And I am blogging about living in Monroe, Mich., on a budget.