OT: The Detroit Free Press is Apparently Imploding
The newspaper we love to hate - for good reason - appears to be imploding. Several things have happened at the Detroit Free Press in the last few weeks and months that point to a complete internal meltdown. The latest shoe dropped Friday morning, when it was announced that Executive Editor Robert Huschka - the top editorial staffer at the paper - was abruptly resigning. No reason given, no new job lined up, so something is obviously up.
This follows the announceent on the Fourth of July that Michigan beat reporter Mark Snyder - co-author of the Stretchgate debacle in 2009 - was abruptly "leaving the profession." Again, no new job lined up. This doesn't just happen.
The newspaper industry as a whole is obviously melting down, and Gannett - owner of the Free Press - is the worst villain of them all in the newspaper world. It's the worst company to work for and does some of the worst and most irresponsible journalism out there. They're awful. They cut jobs like it's a hobby, and they don't care one bit how crappy their papers become.
We hear that more job cuts and abrupt resignations-for-no-reason will be coming. So much has changed at the paper since their Stretchgate hatchet job on RichRod's program, so there's not many people left there to hate. Mike Rosenberg and Mark Snyder are gone, Drew Sharp passed away, the editor who oversaw the hatchet job is gone, and now, so is the predecessor who covered up Sharp's plagiarism on another story.
Even Mick McCabe, who was given the task of attacking John U. Bacon's credibility on "Three and Out, when it came to Bacon's excellent expose of the Free Press, is also gone.
So the bottom line is that the Free Press is slowing slinking into oblivion. We can continue to hate them until they finally go away, but it appears that day is coming fast.
When a five year old spills apple juice on a keyboard which then sticks and creates dp's freaking double posts, we need monitors for five year olds not blog writers. Actually, I am the monitor for t he five yo but you can't watch em every second.
Everyone has an agenda, but I think most people don't mind so much if the bias is acknowledged up front. I read various B1G blogs for schadenfreude and information, but if I read any of those articles in a general-interest ("unbiased") newspaper, I'd be angry and offended. I think the Freep forgot to tell people when it was pushing an opinion, and it wrote its own obituary.
I'd like to think that Brian's readership would keep him 'in check', but we all - well, mostly - agree with pretty much everything he says. So do we *really* keep him in check? Yeah, we'll correct (or disagree with) obvious mistakes or outrageous opinions, but we don't really call him out for anything. I don't think we ever will, either - we pretty much agree with everything he says.
Let's starting listing things we don't agree with Brian about to "keep him in check". You go first...
this made me LOL
and I agree :D
I really didn't like that shirt he had on.
Does Bolivia have internet?
Nope.
...and Twitter gives WD a forum in which to go cry when he doesn't get his way.
Well funded, trusted media is critical to our democracy. Sure, a guy with a camera can report on a cop shooting or a sinkhole, but the same guy could never report on Watergate or Iran Contra, let alone publish his info in a format that couldn't be quickly crushed by a Nixon or a Weinberger.
And this just goes to illustrate the general ignorance of the average person. For someone to posit that the "news" will just shift to regular people reporting with their smart phones is... staggeringly dumb.
Idiocracy is real, and we're living in it. Yay.
Sometimes karma lets you witness it. Bye Freeplicia.
haha, timely
It has become so one sided biased that the editorial page is impossible to read.
Seems like the Freep has lost the viewership battle it's been in since the JOA was reached with the DetNews. As soon as they started sharing everything in a cost saving move, one of them was bound to fail. No sense in having two 'papers' each doing the same thing, with largely the same reporting bias, in the same town. Two paper towns need those papers to say different things. Washington DC has the Post (the more liberal paper) and the Wash News (unapoligetically conservative), and they work because of the opposing views.
Stretchgate aside, I've long thought the Detnews was the better of the two overall, anyway...
And herein lies the crux of the problem. There shouldn't be "teams" when it comes to reporting the fucking news. I'm fine with opinion columnists having a political bias, and letting it show, but a news organisation shouldn't be "left", or "right". They should report the fucking facts to the best of their ability, in an intellectually honest manner. But that's not what we have, and I don't see it happening.
I'm getting unreasonably angry just reading this thread.
Well, evil thoughts and prayers for obliteration, but thoughts and prayers nonetheless.
There is almost something Biblical about this. I wake up on a bright and sunny Sunday morning only to find that the great Newspaper-Satan is dying.
Historically speaking that has always been happening. It is our recency bias that makes it seem like a new event.
A lot of newspapers in the 1800s and 1900s were specifically geared towards a single party and some even had that party in its name. In the early 1900s the Washington Post was openly aligned with the Democrats and wouldn't run pro-women's suffrage stories for awhile, because Woodrow Wilson wanted to avoid the issue in favor of other issues.
The Spanish-American War was arguably created in part due to sensational reporting - "yellow journalism."
A lot of people initially denied the WWII holocaust, which was real, because the media had been caught telling so many lies about fake German atrocities in WWI to sell newspapers and whip up anti-German sentiment. Fake stories of Germans bayoneting babies in Belgium, etc...
Many newspapers would run fake stories simply to sell more newspapers - embellish stories of early flights flying miles and doing loops, make up entire stories from thin air about a telescope seeing monsters on the moon.
It has been going on since "journalism" started.
Sent from MGoBlog HD for iPhone & iPad
MSNBC and CNN are not bizarre extremes of Fox News. Stupid thing to say.
Sent from MGoBlog HD for iPhone & iPad
If establishment = reality then I agree, otherwise you should probably crawl back into your cave. You don't belong in the 21st century.
I actually date the fall of proper journalism to Dan Rather. When he took over for Cronkite (a truly great journalist and anchor), Cronkite inspired such loyalty of viewers that they were crushed. Rather had a good background, but arrived with more tangible bias, instantly. People for the first time in decades looked elsewhere and the CBS Evening news with Dan Rather was no longer #1. This is also the first time that people "cared" about news program ratings. Rather began to change the way the news was delivered and what was covered to try to recover the ratings. It is this ambition for ratings that changed the way "news and facts" were delivered to average americans. This quest for ratings and eyeballs has spilled over to print and now internet media. When people begin to seek facts again and not agenda, bias or opinion. Then journalism will have a renaissance.
Well put.
You should avoid both of them, BrewMom, they're both trash, just from opposite viewpoints.
Let us celebrate potentially hundreds of people losing their jobs, a lot of which may or may have not had nothing to do with the whole Rich Rod thing. And if they did, who gives a shit? Sports are not real life.
Some of you guys have a lot of hate in your hearts. Let it go, move on with your life.
"Sports are not real life?"
Too often the Freep's reporting is "not real life." Couple that with the internet and the Freep was inevitably going to struggle.