By Joel Thurtell
Ed Wendover dropped me and a few other people a line today when he heard about the plans to degrade the two Detroit dailies into “twoly” and “threely” home delivery operations respectively for the Detroit News and Detroit Free press.
Wendover is former publisher of the Community Crier in Plymouth. He was a a staunch foe of the Joint Operating Agreement in 1989 which allowed the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press to join at the wallet in a so-called “100-year monopoly” that the owners, Gannett and Knight-Ridder, hoped would make them a fortune.
Here’s what Wendover had to say:
FRIENDS OF NEWSPAPERS EVERYWHERE:
YES that’s right…
cut back on quality of content and service and expect readers to stay with you!
it is entirely embarrassing to good, honest newspaper folks that the Knight-Ridder (now defunct ENTIRELY) and Gannett beancounters have mismanaged a government-awarded MONOPOLY right into the ground. we predicted the JOA would never survive its 99 years, but we sure hoped it’d make it more than 16 years.
Detroit, once known as a great newspaper writers’ town, is in danger of going from the largest U.S. OKd monopoly (next to professional baseball) to the first major U.S. city without a home-delivered daily newspaper…
also please note the timing of this: the George W. Bush Justice Department is still (as minimally as ever) in charge for only 35 more days… they had to hurry this announcement to get it under the auspices of the “Justice” LAPDOGS who Ok’d the Sept. 2, 2005 Gannet sham swap of the News/Free Press, Knight-Ridders slinking out from Detroit in the middle of the night and Dean Singleton’s oscar-winning “JOA rescue” ACT.
should we re-start The Detroit Sunday Journal? heck, we’d even deliver it! please pass this on!!!
— wendover
I’ll be back soon with my own thoughts about yesterday’s announcement by the Detroit papers. If I were the Free Press in high kill-Kwame dudgeon, I’d point out that I scooped the papers on their own story months ago. But I’m not about to do that.
Drop me a line at joelthurterll(at)gmail.com
I am one of the people that reads the paper online for the most part. I did, however, staunchly support the Detroit Sunday Journal and the striking newspaper workers by coming to fundraising events and faithfully buying the paper. In fact, I still have the last edition in a box somewhere that I kept because it meant something to me. I was in a position before the strike that I read the paper daily (I worked in a gas station) but did not subscribe and couln’t afford to. Now I’m in a position to subscribe and the only thing that intersts me to any degree is the local news. Joel’s blog here is something that avidly captures my interest. It is obvious that it’s not the writers I’m having issue with, but the direction they are led about what they write.
The failure of the Freep/News has nothing to do with the JOA and everything to do with the general decline of newspapers everywhere. The Freep-News just happens to be in the most depressed market in the country.