Free Press or fish wrapper?

By Joel Thurtell

Could Michigan’s oldest newspaper become a tabloid?

 

Hey, it could be worse.

 

The Detroit Free Press could wind up just as its top editors now envision it — a skimpy rag for home subscribers who pay for it and something slightly more substantial as a freebie on the web.

 

Isn’t that what they’re doing now?

 

Believe me, folks, if the hotshots on West Jefferson have their way, you won’t recognize the venerable Free Press.

 

I know, things haven’t been the same since Knight-Ridder’s Free Press joined Gannett’s  Detroit News in a federally-approved monopoly in 1989.

 

I know, too, that things haven’t been the same since Gannett and Knight-Ridder pushed the unions to strike in 1995, hoping to squash organized labor at the newspapers and make life easier and cheaper ever after for the owners. The companies lost hundreds of thousands of readers, but the unions are still there.

 

Their latest game plan — though they don’t seem to know it — is to just disappear.

 

First, of course, editors Paul Anger and Caesar Andrews propose “to rethink how we report, edit and present information.” How many times have we heard that one? “Re-thinking the Free Press” was the mantra of onetime Freep publisher Carole Leigh Hutton just before her pals, the bosses of now-defunct Knight-Ridder, sold the Free Press to Gannett.

 

And I love this line  from the Anger-Andrews June 23 memo to Freepsters: “Many staffers will be actively involved, and we welcome input or questions from all — starting now.”

 

“Starting now.” Or else?

 

Maybe if they’d tried to mine ideas from employees before this, they wouldn’t have got themselves into this jam. Right. Come on, this is corporate America. Top-down is the way it always works. Or in this case, apparently, doesn’t work.

 

Hard to imagine workers willingly putting their heads together when management just announced they want to usher 150 more staffers out the door and if they don’t get that many, layoffs could be the answer.

 

But the brains of West Jeff have bad news for everyone: If you’re paying to have the Free Press delivered right now, here’s what you’re likely to find in that plastic tube, and this comes before the double A’s even start rethinking: “We’re heading toward a Free Press that will emphasize a combination of quickly absorbed information with tighter writing and editing and commitment to enterprising reporting. We’ve been working with DMP (Detroit Media Partnership, the business side of the News and Free Press) folks on concepts for a compact, contemporary Free Press that offers excellent content in a smaller, easily absorbed product with dynamic design to support that approach.”

 

Wow. I need to pause for breath. “Compact.” “Contemporary.” “Dynamic.”

 

If it’s “enterprise” in reporting you want, don’t talk to the geniuses in DMP. Better consult with the reporters you’re showing the door.

 

Sounds like tabloid to me.

 

Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s steamy text messages would feel right at home.

 

Hard to believe that, after shedding 260 workers in the past roughly half year, there will be enough bodies left to clean the johns, let alone create a compact, contemporary and dynamic newspaper. 

 

I forgot: Gannett closed most of the johns months ago. So that’s not a worry. And if the county health department approves Gannett’s rethought proposal for a series of outhouses on West Lafayette, why, staffers can quit complaining about the dearth of toilets, too.

 

The outhouse plan poses a problem of its own, though, because of this sentence in the AA boys’ memo: “We’ll use much less newsprint, we’ll stop doing more things in print, and we’ll put more information on the Web.”

 

Get it? No newsprint, no toilet paper for those outhouses. The Web is many things, but you can’t make it wipe.

 

Okay, I’m just kidding about the outhouses.  I don’t THINK Gannett would stoop that low.

 

“Much less newsprint.” In the past three years, they’ve reduced news space by roughly 35 percent. How can they cut the paper’s size further and still call it a newspaper?

 

I’m getting ahead of myself. These guys have it covered. “We’re going to implement a sequence of news meetings that emphasize what we’re doing for the Web at any given minute. We’ll create a central hub for assignment editors for print and Web so they can work side-by-side and communicate more easily. We’ll have a new system for long-range planning, and we’ll have some new job descriptions.”

 

“A sequence of news meetings” — right. Meetings with whom? Thirteen percent of the workforce will be gone. Meetings. If you’re incompetent, call a meeting. Get more incompetents to share the culpability. Ford Motor Co. holds lots of management meetings, I hear. But hey, they’re good till 2010, right?

 

A “new system for long-range planning”? That implies they had a system before. If you shed 13 percent of your people in half a year, you didn’t have a plan. I worked at the Free Press 23 years and never saw signs of more than hand-to-mouth survivalism, which is not planning — it’s called “feed the beast.” But maybe planning will be easier with all those people gone.

 

“New job descriptions”?  You dump 260 positions in half a year and still need new job descriptions?

Why not just give everyone a broom and call them janitors?

 

I’m trying to conjure a picture of that “central hub” when there’s nobody left to revolve around it.

 

“The Web is our priority, our future,” according to A2. “Our changing newsroom will mean more resources devoted to the Web in all departments and Web-first thinking as our instinct without exception. We’ll have a planning structure that won’t let Web thinking fall through the cracks anywhere in the newsroom. We’ve come a long way, our traffic is soaring, and we’re going into overdrive.”

 

Wow. “Overdrive.” If I’m not mistaken, that’s lingo straight from the American car industry. Not a fit metaphor of success these days.

 

I’ve said this so many times I’m getting tired of it: Why would anyone pay for a product that is being downsized out of existence?

 

That is what these “rethinkers” haven’t thought of. What they’re really talking about is squeezing more and more quality out of the newspaper. They wonder why people aren’t buying their Free Press. Easy: They’re foisting a shoddier and shoddier product on the public. People won’t pay for junky newspapers, same as they’re flocking to Honda and Toyota. People are too smart to go on paying for a bad deal. Unlike the Japanese carmakers, though, we don’t have to pay for Internet news.

 

I was glad to see the double A guys end on a really upbeat note.  True, they’ll soon be down 260 people.

“We will have some new job opportunities for the staff members who stay.”

 

Bring your own mop and pail.

 

Contact me at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com