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The Annals of Bad Timing

By Amy Sullivan | @sullivanamy | March 31, 2009 | +

Via the New York Times, a reminder that many Detroiters won’t be able to read about the collapse of their local industry:

Maybe once a year, a city has a news day as heavy as the one that just hit Detroit: The White House forced out the chairman of General Motors, word leaked that the administration wanted Chrysler to hitch its fortunes to Fiat, and Michigan State University’s men’s basketball team reached the Final Four, which will be held in Detroit.

All of this news would have landed on hundreds of thousands of Motor City doorsteps and driveways on Monday morning, in the form of The Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News.

Would have, that is, except that Monday — of all days — was the long-planned first day of the newspapers’ new strategy for surviving the economic crisis by ending home delivery on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays.

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  • Dee in Columbia MD

    So exactly why are we supposed to care this again? I get that we need a free press to maintain a flourishing democracy. But is home delivery of the printed daily paper the only means? And if you were not a print journalist would you post about this? Tell me why this story is important, interesting or connected to my daily existence and irony alone is not enough.

  • Matt

    But I bet they have boffo online coverage…

    http://www.political-buzz.com/

  • http://phd9.blogspot.com Paul Dirks

    My whole outlook on this is influenced by the fact that I live in a place with a truly mediocre local paper, no home delivery feasable and a good online-only paper that’s been operating for years now.
    .
    If I still lived in a major city OTOH, I’d probably want to read the daily paper.

  • Ivy_B

    There is talk that the group that has taken over the Phila Inq and Daily News, now in Chapter 11, will be broke by July. That will be a sad new era for me. Of course the status of the company did not stop the large executive bonuses last year…

  • Ivy_B

    Not that anyone cares, but here’s the link to the exec bonuses I mentioned above.
    .
    http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003957106

  • kbanginmotown

    I live in a red county west of the Detroit Metro area. The front page story above the fold today is US Rep. Mike Roger criticizing the Obama plan to save the taxpayers’ money through a restructuring of GM & Chrysler.
    .
    Last week, he was lauded for “Bringing Home the Bacon” in the form of a $10M roads earmark in the Stimulus Package, despite having voted against the bill!
    .
    @Dee: The danger, IMHO, is that what happened to radio (i.e. RW-talk radio) will happen to newspapers. As the moderate / progressive voices are silenced, the remainders will tend to be the fear/hate-mongers. This would pollute public discourse for a generation, as we’ve seen happen on the AM dial.

  • stuartzechman

    Jay Newton-Small:
    .
    Fortunately for all of us, newspapers aren’t journalism:

    Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.
    .
    When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

    Clay Shirky is right; Detroiters don’t need printed newspapers delivered to their doors on Mondays, they need journalism.

  • stuartzechman

    Did I call Amy Sullivan “Jay Newton-Small”?
    .
    Ah yes, I did.
    .
    When I was writing the post, I was doing so with the habitual expectation of a response to commentary. Amy Sullivan isn’t smart enough to engage her readers, so I automatically added “Jay Newton-Small” to the top of my comment.
    .
    Isn’t that funny?

  • yutsano

    Leftover flu goofiness? What’s just as funny is that didn’t make me bat an eye when I read it!

  • stuartzechman

    yutsano:
    .
    The important part is that Clay Shirky is right.

  • yutsano

    The important part is that Clay Shirky is right.
    -
    Agreed.

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