By Joel Thurtell
For months, I’ve been reporting that the Detroit Free Press was planning to drop daily print publication and go to twice or thrice a week delivery, with the remaining four or five days of news plopped onto that virtual driveway known as the Internet.
Last time I reported a version of this inside-the-temple news, on November 30, 2008, I got a denial from a Free Press spokesman, er, I mean star reporter.
Wrote Mike Elrick: “Joel, we’ve been told that the new plan does not eliminate daily publication of the paper. Have you considered that this offer is geared to readers who want the papers that come with all the inserts without the other 5 days’ worth of papers?”
No, I had not considered that possibility.
Good thing, too.
Appears it was baloney.
Smoke screen.
His denial seemed like déjà vu all over again.
I’d heard denials from Free Press management earlier this year when I reported the bosses planned to scrap the popular-with-readers (though not with editors) weekly Community Free Press sections.
Anybody seen a CFP lately?
Oh, managers waited till August to knife the Sunday editions. But kill them they did.
Detroit Media Partnership, a euphemism for the Gannett-controlled monopoly that runs the News and Free Press, didn’t wait months to slice daily home delivery of the two papers following my unofficial announcement.
The bad news thudded onto driveways in the December 12, 2008 Wall Street Journal:
Headline: “Detroit Dailies to Curtail Home Delivery.”
Journal writer Russell Adams wrote, “The publisher of the Detroit Free Press, the country’s 20th largest paper by weekday circulation, is expected to announce next week that it will cease home delivery of the print edition of the newspaper on most days of the week, according to a person familiar with the company’s thinking.”
Will there be more denials?
Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
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