By Joel Thurtell
We can all be forgiven, I think, for heaving a big sigh of relief Friday that the Kwame Kilpatrick perjury prosecution saga came to an end with the mayor’s guilty pleas and resignation. Now, it seemed, we could get some peace and escape from those incessant Detroit newspaper headlines and the 20-page special Detroit Free Press section on Kwamegate and go back to our normal lives.
Not to be: We woke up Sunday to a special Free Press treat: “After the resignation — How did mayoral scandal impact you?”
Impact on me? Really? The Free Press is interested in me?
Okay, the impact on me was newspaper overload. Too much self-serving, crappy journalism.
(Incidentally, I linked to the Free Press website, but as so often happens, what I read in my print edition is not reflected in the Internet version, including that “impact you” headline. A bit of print vs. Web schizophrenia at the Freep?)
Clearly, the Freep is not going to give Kwamegate a rest. How can they? Having garnered a couple of journalism awards, they’re gunning for the biggie, the Pulitzer. That requires pulling out all the stops until the prizes are announced sometime next year. At some point, the paper, supposedly so strapped for money it jettisoned 13 percent of its staff in a six-month period, will pop for a special reprint of all its Kwame stories to be sent to every newspaper with an editor who might serve on the Pulitzer committee.
Anyway, since it is our fate to be dragged through this nightmare over and over for the next few months, I thought it fitting to ask my own question of readers and former and current Free Press staffers: “What is the impact of newspaper redlining on you?”
What is redlining?
According to Wikipedia, redlining “is the practice of denying or increasing the cost of services, such as banking, insurance, access to jobs,[2] access to health care,[3] or even supermarkets[4] to residents in certain, often racially determined,[5] areas. The most devastating form of redlining, and the most common use of the term, refers to mortgage discrimination, in which middle-income black and Hispanic residents are denied loans that are made available to lower-income whites. The term “redlining” was coined in the late 1960s by community activists in Chicago. It describes the practice of marking a red line on a map to delineate the area where banks would not invest; later the term was applied to discrimination against a particular group of people (usually by race or sex), no matter the geography. During the heyday of redlining these areas were most frequently black inner city neighborhoods. Later, through at least the 1990s, this discrimination involved lending to lower-income whites, but not to middle- or upper-income blacks.”
Now, what the newspaper does differs from what banks have done, because the newspaper is not denying anybody loans or checking accounts. What they’re cutting off is coverage of certain areas. For instance, in the late 1990s, I was instructed by a Free Press editor not to look for stories in the city of Pontiac, because its residents were poor and its businesses didn’t buy ads in the Free Press. Look for stories in the “money belt” — the wealthy communities like Bloomfield Hills, the editor told me.
More recently, I was not to look for stories in Southwest Detroit, which includes Mexicantown and the very poor community of Delray. I also could not write about River Rouge, Ecorse, Melvindale, and even Dearborn, Garden City, Westland and Inkster were off limits.
If I really want to write about one of these towns, I had to trick the paper into running the story. For instance, last year I wanted to write about the Delray Community Center in Southwest Detroit, but it was not in our circulation area. But I learned that some people from Grosse Ile were doing volunteer work at the center. Grosse Ile received the paper. That gave me license to write about the center. But residents of Delray, one of the poorest, most blight-ridden areas in Detroit, were not receiving my stories.
Now, here’s a real live description of what I consider to be redlining at the Free Press, from a real live staffer describing a real situation in the newsroom. The staffer wrote about something in Southwest Detroit, after which a boss ordered the writer “not to use any more items re Mexicantown.” Reason: The Free Press has “no readership there.” The same person was told by a photo editor that “the photographers refused to travel around checking maps to make sure they weren’t in the periphery of areas of Detroit that we weren’t supposed to cover.”
Here’s what one staffer told me about redlining:
Detroit isn’t the only place neglected by the paper. My parents live outside Lowell in western Michigan. They’ve taken the Free Press for many years. Not now. Their area no longer gets Free Press home delivery.
Redlining — it’s happening in the boondocks, too.
Do you have a report of newspaper redlining? What’s the impact of newspapers excluding certain communities from coverage?
I’d like to hear about it.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
Joel, a few years ago I was inquiring about free-lance writing at the free press and suggested several stories about royal oak. I was told by the annoyed-sounding suburban editor that royal oak was also one of those cities the Free Press wasn’t interested in. Imagine that, one of the fastest growing cities in the region. Instead, they wanted me to write about development in Rochester — the usual kind of story they were running at the time: Urban sprawl versus the locals who were opposed to new roads, sewer systems, higher taxes, etc. It was a story worth pursuing, but every one the Free Press published sounded like the last one, just change the name of those involved. Anyway, the justification was the paper wanted to grow readership there.