[donation]
By Joel Thurtell
It was bad enough that the Detroit Free Press on Monday, September 16, 2008 failed to mention on Page One the bankruptcy of the huge Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers or the sale of the huge Wall Street brokerage house Merrill Lynch or the devastation visited by the huge wind known as Hurricane Ike on Galveston, but saved 1A room for an update nonstory about Mayor Kilpatrick’s onetime chief of staff and lover, Christine Beatty.
That was my hastily-drawn conclusion as I drank coffee and psyched myself up for working on my latest book. I put the Freep down and got all I needed to know about Lehman, Merril Lynch and Ike from the New York Times.
But some Free Press staffers — and readers — noted the same lapse, though “lapse” seems an inadequate mot for describing a newspaper’s obsession with plowing furrows in the Kwame story even after the harvest.
The staffers looked in vain through the entire print version of the paper for any mention of Lehman and found none. Frankly, I had assumed the paper’s editorial people could not have been so lame as to have totally ignored the failure of a firm whose fall caused the Dow to fall more than 500 points.
By ten in the morning, the Free Press had posted the Lehman story on the Web. Big deal. It doesn’t take a journalist to see which way the Web stories are blowing and post a copycat item.
The Free Press addiction to Kwamegate caused it to drop the ball big time for the readers it claims to serve, while the New York Times and the Detroit News put Lehman on Page One.
But at least the Freep had it on the Web.
The Web, the Web,
In the past, I’ve written that the Pulitzer Prize has become the Free Press’ compulsive quest in its Kwamegate coverage. I’m beginning to think the Pulitzer is chump change in comparison to the paper — and owner Gannett’s — premier obsession: the Web.
I wonder if the redlining I’ve been describing — the wholesale lopping of huge areas of readership from Free Press and News delivery routes and orders to writers to stop covering those areas — isn’t part of a self-created, self-fulfilling prophecy.
The more circulation declines, the more the newspaper is justified in dropping its print version altogether and publishing only on the Internet.
Could it be that they WANT their circulation to go down? I’ve argued elsewhere (see my blog category, The Future of Newspapers) that the demise of American newspapers is self-inflicted. I’ve also repeated the old saying that “newspaper people brag about their drinking and lie about circulation.”
I assumed they were lying upwardly.
But I’m hearing anecdotes about the papers’ refusal to deliver papers to suburban convenience stores and cutting readers in western Michigan. I know from my 23 years of experience at the paper what was happening to city of Detroit deliveries and I had orders not to write about parts of Detroit and many suburbs.
Could it be that the direction of the lying now is downward?
Is it possible that managers want to persuade shareholders that readership is so damaged they have no choice but to stop printing and go Web only?
Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
By ten in the morning,
