The change we're stuck with

What a day to stop the presses. As the New York Times rubs in, Detroit's dailies ended home delivery on one of the heaviest news days of the year. General Motors and Chrysler will be forcibly restructured by the White House, L. Brooks Patterson wants to steal the Auto Show, Michigan State made the Final Four, and the fact that both papers stopped home delivery is itself national news.

As the headlines make so evident, Detroit has never needed its journalists more, but the recession is putting one paper after another out of print or out of business altogether. The casualties so far include Flint, Saginaw, Bay City, and Detroit, whose papers have all cut daily delivery, and the Ann Arbor News, which closed outright. If the economic downturn lasts much longer (and it's likely to last quite awhile), there may be no newspapers left standing to tell us about it.

Off the radar

Model D has a roundup of Detroit blogs this week. There are some goodies there, but alas, mine didn't make the cut. So kudos to you, dear readers, for following this blog despite the complete lack of promotion or publicity. The few, the proud, the think Detroiters.

Called it

The News and Free Press are cutting home delivery to just Thursday, Friday, and Sunday. The paper will still be published seven days a week, but it will only be available at stores and in coin boxes. But I wouldn't call it much of a paper. The Free Press promises "a more compact product ... with an easy-to-pull-out sports section, provocative commentary and enriched lifestyle coverage." On weekends, the paper will be "more substantial" -- thus admitting that the daily paper will not be substantial -- but will also include more "features with quick summaries of information and events." In other words, the Free Press will, in so much as possible, no longer publish news.

The Free Press brags without shame that this strategy "contrasts with significant across-the-board cuts ... at many newspapers" despite years of cutbacks that have gutted both of our dailies. And the cuts will likely continue as the papers hemorrhage readers and make the rocky (but necessary) transition to the internet. The future looks very ugly, not just here but everywhere (see the New Yorker for the scope of the problem). The truth is, for the foreseeable future, Detroit will have no reliable, in-depth news source -- and it needs it, bad.

The death of print

Print journalism is dying, fast. Newspapers have been declining for more than twenty years, and the recession, coupled with the continued growth of the internet, is bankrupting what remains of the industry.

The Christian Science Monitor will soon be online-only after a century in print. Time, Inc. is slashing its staff. Locally, the "Daily" Tribune will now be published just four days a week. I wouldn't blink if the News, the Metro Times, or any of our small local papers announce more major cutbacks or simply fold.

So what will replace them? So far, not much. Detroit's web-only media is rapidly expanding, from Model D to Detour to bloggers, but none of these are news organizations. Model D rounds up and writes positive news about Detroit; it won't tell you that the mayor's corrupt or the cops are underfunded. Among bloggers, only Detroit Blog does original reporting. His profiles are great -- who else would interview this guy? -- but he's no replacement for a beat reporter doing hard news.

The New York Times says the future may lie with small, web-only, non-profit journalism outfits. If so, I hope someone gives it a try here soon. As it stands, not only are the dailies totally inadequate, there are no alternatives online.

How the News fails at blogging

Today I discovered two good blogs published by the Detroit News: Living in the D, a five-person blog on life in the city, and Going Home, which offers an in-depth and personal look at the east side neighborhood near City Airport.

Discounting, for now, their journalistic value, what I most wonder is this -- why did I only learn of them today? I'm an informed, internet savvy consumer of Detroit media. Not only do I read the News and the Free Press online every day, I read everything else listed at right, including several local blogs and the Detroit Yes forums. Yet I didn't learn of either until I read this thoughtful story in the Columbia Journalism Review about the blurring of reporting and advocacy on Going Home. Note to the Detroit News: If reading the Columbia Journalism Review is what it takes for your target audience to find your blogs, your media strategy has failed.

The problem, I suspect, lies less with a lack of promotion than with fundamentally poor design. The News's website is a cluttered, unworkable mess. It boasts more than seventy blogs, but they do not have their own sub-domains and are impossible to search or navigate. It's hard to imagine a more confusing set up. I admire the News for trying (the Detriot News Labs blog suggests its effort is nothing if not sincere), but to my eyes it is so far failing in its online endeavors.

This is a subject I promise to return to. Expect more media criticism come January when I'm home from abroad.

Spreading the good news

Issue Media Group, publisher of Model D and Metromode, is expanding into Washtenaw with a new online weekly called Concentrate. Like its Detroit cousins, Concentrate will highlight development and job growth as an antidote to traditional media that focus solely on "unemployment, fire, murder and crime."

I like to poke fun at the unerringly upbeat tone of these publications, but I truly appreciate what they're doing. Model D is a weekly reminder that Detroit is not dead. Indeed, in many respects, it's on the upswing.

Detroit embraces "new media"

Metromode covers Detroit's baby steps toward "new media". Of course, the best examples of new media in Detroit are Metromode itself and its sister publication, Model D. To that list you might add Detour Magazine, the online pop-culture magazine started by ex-Metrotimes staffers. But Detroit's web and media presence is definitely growing, both in scope and sophistication, and I'm glad to be part of that.