The Future of Newspapers, Part 1.1

By Joel Thurtell

When I started this blog, I fully intended to turn it into a carbon copy of the Detroit Free Press community newspaper whose pages ran my stories for the past several years. That was before I understood what I was getting into with the blog. Maybe I should say that was before I realized how entrapped my brain was in the newspaper’s peculiar and, from my new perspective rigid manner of thinking.

Yes, I planned to write “cover stories” similar to the ones I banged out for the good old Free Press. But that was then. Which is to say less than a month into this brave new world, I’m starting to realize that I’ve stepped into a dimension where I am free to re-invent my writing and myself. I don’t HAVE to write cover stories. Wow, what a thought. I like to think I pushed the envelope by writing first-person accounts of my experiences trying out things — blowing glass, carving an ice sculpture, playing a church organ, rowing a shell in the Detroit River and so on. But no matter how I tried to free myself from the constraints of mundane journalism, I was ensnared in the paper journalist’s rule book.

If there is to be a future for newspapers, their owners had better toss that rule book out. Problem is, they don’t understand there is a rule book. Worse, it’s really hard to figure out the rules in this new game called the Internet.

Here’s what I mean about freeing myself from those old, arbitrary and, yes, irrational, rules. Imagine that you are assigned to crank out five stories a week about a geographic area that for some reason is called “Downriver” and another one called, seemingly more reasonably, “Plymouth-Canton-Northville.” You get an idea for a story in a Downriver community, say, River Rouge. Great. But you can’t write it. Why not? Well Downriver is not Downriver, as far as your newspaper is concerned. Example: To all the world, River Rouge, a town situated just south of Detroit at the confluence of the Rouge and Detroit Rivers, seems to me is as Downriver as a town can get. But your newspaper has chosen not to deliver your Community Free Press weekly section to River Rouge. ny story you write about the town will not be read there. Thus, according to the perverse logic of your newspaper, River Rouge is NOT Downriver. And because it’s not Downriver, even though it IS Downriver, you can’t write about it.

See what I mean? It’s whacky, but we had to train ourselves to think that way. It was the same under Knight-Ridder, before Gannett bought the Free Press and Knight Ridder vanished into thin air.

It was Newspaper Think, and it’s why the papers are in trouble. How can you reach out to people, cajole them into buying your paper and paying for your ads, when you pretend they’re not there?

It wasn’t new to the Free Press. When I came back from the strike in 1997, a fellow reporter and friend at the Free Press warned me that certain suburban communities weren’t being covered, he believed because so many of their inhabitants had stopped subscribing to the paper because they sympathized with the strike. Some of these communities were Downriver, some were in western Wayne. I sat through a meeting with editors who put little stickers on the county maps. Favored communities got “platinum” stickers. Upon my return in ’97, I was assigned to the Oakland Bureau in Royal Oak. I was to cover the various Bloomfields and Pontiac, but the city editor told me not to bother with Pontiac because what he wanted was coverage of the “moneybags” in the Bloomfields.

Who wins in a situation like that? Not the people of River Rouge. Not the people in Pontiac. Not even the people in the Bloomfields we were supposed to suck up to. Maybe they would LIKE to read about Pontiac.

Not the people in other Downriver towns who might like to know what’s up with their neighbors. Not the newspaper, for that matter, because it’s not faithfully representing communities even though it claims to be covering them. And when a reporter has to explain to someone with a legitimate story idea that it can’t be done not because it’s a bad idea, but because it’s happening on the wrong side of the tracks, both sides know the situation is ridiculous. Isn’t there a word for it in banking and insurance? “Redlining,” I believe it’s called.

But that is the newspaper mind set, and a reporter has to self-censor his or her articles to conform to the delivery map of the paper’s production department.

Compare this to the web. As a blogger, I can write that River Rouge story. When I visit my son in Los Angeles, I’ll write about what I find there. As a blogger, you see, I don’t have to be concerned about printing and delivering physical papers. It was that huge assignment — every day running presses and trucking paper products all around the state and beyond — that so limits the imagination of newspaper managers that they can’t possibly do the creative thinking they need to do to dig themselves out of the hole they’ve made for their businesses. And since I’m not selling ads, I have no incentive to discriminate by geography.

Little by little, I’m understanding how chained my imagination was, how snarled up in absurd territorial-think I was. And so gradually, I find that I’m thinking of stories not only beyond my old geographic limits, but also topics into which I never before dared stray.

For instance, have a look at my piece on Joe Haydn and how I geek myself, energize myself, in the morning. You wouldn’t have seen that in the Free Press. Watch for more of these faux-music critiques. Why not? So what if I lack the credentials of a musical Authority? What difference does it make that I think the circle of fifths is a container of booze? I’ll write about the music I like when I like. That’s one difference between blogging and newspapering.

There are other differences. I just haven’t figured them out.

Send me a line at joelthurtell(a)gmail.com